“You’re going to hell.”
“My parents say I can’t talk to you because you’re gay.”
“I bet if I kissed you, you’d like it.”
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“You don’t deserve to live.”
“My parents say you’re a pervert and if I beat you up, they wouldn’t care.”
“You should kill yourself.”
“Die!”
Those are some of the things that Tennessee mom Lindsey Patrick-Wright says were shouted at her sixth grader, Pippy, at West Wilson Middle School in Mount Juliet this year. Patrick-Wright recited the list during the public comment session at the Wilson County School Board meeting over the weekend. She later told the Daily Beast she left out one comment.
“My mom says it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!”
Patrick-Wright says Pippy replied, “Well, I’m a lesbian, so I don’t want Adam or Steve.”
Patrick-Wright reports that Pippy first came out to her family as a lesbian in the fourth grade. Six months later later, Pippy asked to be referred to by the pronouns she and they.
“Then it was ‘they, them,’” Patrick-Wright said.
Two teachers and a counselor have been remarkably supportive of Pippy, Patrick-Wright says, “and did try to give my child a safe space at school.”
Pippy also had a number of very close and protective friends
“But my child should not have had to hear the awful things that they heard,” Patrick-Wright said.
The mother reported that the verbal abuse intensified around February, the time of this year’s school musical, The Addams Family.
“My kid shaved their head, and they did it in part because they were playing Uncle Fester,” Patrick-Wright said.
The mother estimated that over the school year, Pippy came home from school upset “at least 30 percent of the days, if not 50.”
“And it’s primarily because a lot of this was happening on the bus,” Patrick-Wright said. “It happened in the hallway, in the cafeteria, and on the bus. And those are three areas where it is very difficult for the staff and the teachers to moderate behavior.”
She added, “I think the teachers are doing the best job that they can. And I don’t blame the administrators. I blame the elected officials who are allowing this rhetoric to be repeated in the homes.”
She offered an estimate of how much of the bigotry comes from adults.
“All of it,” she said.
Since 2015, the Tennessee legislature has enacted 19 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, more than any other state. Senate Bill 1440 legally defines a gender as “a person’s immutable biological sex as determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth and evidence of a person’s biological sex.”
Right-wingers with ties to such extremist groups as Moms for Liberty have begun showing up at Wilson County School board meetings. They denigrated the public schools and called for banning books with any LBGTQ+ content.
Patrick-Wright noted that many of the agitators do not even have a kid in the local public school system.
“I’ve been getting up at board meetings this whole year to talk about book-banning and to talk about the epidemic of Moms for Liberty and what they’re doing to dismantle the public education system,” she told The Daily Beast. “That's what I’ve been focused on. I haven’t wanted to put my kid in the spotlight.”
But in recent days, Pippy announced that they had decided not to attend school in person next year.
“They advocated for themselves to attend virtual school so that they didn’t have to face this bullying every day,” Patrick-Wight said. “They’re excited about it, and we’ve got plenty of activities to keep them social.”
The decision meant Patrick-Wright was free to speak her mind without fear of repercussions for her child.
“It allows me to stand up and speak for the parents who aren’t ready to, and for the kids who can’t,” she told The Daily Beast.
In between regular meetings, the seven school board members hold work sessions. Board member Joseph Padilla—who represents Pippy’s district—proposed during a July 6 working session that a parent or guardian be notified in writing within three days of when any teacher, counselor or administrator becomes aware that a student is identifying “as a gender that does not align with a child’s sex on their birth certificate.”
“This is common sense to me,” Padilla said at the session.
Board member Carrie Pfeiffer was the only one of the six other board members who spoke out against the idea of a school outing a kid.
“I would say that it is not the role of the school,” she told her colleagues. “I would say that it would undermine, if not destroy, the relationship between students and their teachers.”
Padilla replied with the myopic view of the far right. “What we’re trying to do here is just let the parents know if their child is wanting to go by a different name.”
Pfeiffer was not having it.
“My position on that is that you as a parent have a responsibility to know your child and to talk to your child and to parent your child, and that it is not the school’s job to do your parenting for you and to have that relationship on your behalf,” she said.
“And it is the school’s job to maintain a relationship, an educational relationship with the child, and that if the child does not trust the people who are their teachers, that that has a significant impact on the ability of the child to learn.”
Padilla was not about to accept what really was common sense.
“A child gets in a fight at school, we call the parents,” he said. “If a child gets caught with drugs at school, we call the parents.”
“Are you suggesting that a child's sexual orientation or transgender orientation is a disciplinary matter?” Pfeiffer asked.
Patrick-Wright watched a video of the work session online and she arrived at the regular school board meeting on Monday night with much to say. She also had a stack of T-shirts that Pippy had designed—along with stickers and buttons—emblazoned with three words that Padillo repeatedly uttered during the school year and that Pippy had made a mantra of their own.
“WILSON COUNTY VALUES.”
Patrick-Wright was wearing one when she stepped up to the podium during the public comment session.
“I’m responsible for these shirts and I want to tell you why,” she said. “If I’m not here in person, I’m watching these meetings at home with my 13-year-old that goes to Wilson County Schools and we repeatedly see our zone representative, Joe Padilla, make bigoted comments and propose discriminatory policies that target LGBTQ students and say that he's just representing Wilson County values.”
The surprise was that Pfeiffer was also wearing one of Pippy’s “WILSON COUNTY VALUES” shirts. Padillo had on an American flag shirt as Patrick-Wright addressed him directly.
“Wilson County deserves to know that the majority of us do not subscribe to the bigoted ideas of what you think Wilson County value stands for,” she said.
She then recited the list of terrible things that her child had been called during the school year.
“And the kicker is, my kid’s lucky when they go home,” she then said. “They have a family that loves and supports them, a family that doesn't believe their identity is a mental illness.”
She again spoke directly to Padillo.
“Joe, not all kids have that support at home, and you all know that. How dare you propose taking away the one lifeline that a kid might have of a trusted teacher? How dare you propose taking away the ability for a teacher to be that lifeline? Shame on you!”
She then addressed the full board, as she had at other meetings about banned books.
“Your colleague proposed the forced outing of trans students and only one of you stood up to him,” Patrick-Wright said. “These books aren’t dangerous. Your rhetoric is dangerous. Your proposed policies are dangerous. We are not asking you all to understand our kids. We are asking, we are begging you, if you will not support our kids, leave them alone.“
She ended with a plea.
“Do better! All of you!”
The West Wilson Middle School was destroyed by a tornado in 2020. The pandemic followed. And now, just as things were otherwise getting back to normal, another kind of sickness has spread from political leaders to families to the school.
And a magical 13-year-old with a magnificent mom is being driven to go virtual to escape a psychic virus called bigotry.
