Courtney Crowder

ccrowder@dmreg.com

FAIRFIELD, Ia. — Fairfield High School’s band and choir trip to St. Louis in mid-May was the one of the last school-sponsored activities that Draven Spicer, a senior, took part in before graduation. He couldn't wait to hang out with his choir and band friends at the zoo and Six Flags amusement park after their two scheduled performances.

But he was most excited to stay overnight in a hotel room with other boys. Assigned female at birth, Spicer struggled with his gender identity for years before coming out as a transgender boy at the end of his sophomore year.

“I was finally going to get to room with boys, and it was the only time I would get to room with boys in high school, and I knew I was going to feel so much more comfortable than I had before when I roomed with girls," he said. "It was going to feel right. I knew it.”

What Spicer didn't know as he and the other kids boarded the bus early that Saturday morning is that his rooming with boys coupled with a just-released federal Department of Education “Dear Colleague Letter” instructing K-12 schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom aligning with their gender identity was going to ignite a controversy in his school district.

That controversy, which focuses on what facilities transgender students should use at public schools, has divided the school board and the town, known as a hub for transcendental meditation and a bastion of progressive thinking. It caused the last few days of the school year to became what students and activists have called a “political war zone,” marked by an increase in bullying and threats of physical violence. The tension lingered throughout the summer, reaching a fever-pitch Monday, with the start of school less than a week away.

Gender identity, or the gender with which a person identifies, has been included in the Iowa Civil Rights Act for almost a decade, meaning transgender Iowans have legal protections against discrimination in education, employment, housing and public accommodations. And a 2015 Iowa Department of Education guidance said students “cannot be forced to use a bathroom for which they do not identify.”

Yet school districts around the state are wrestling with questions regarding transgender students' access to bathroom facilities, local lawyers and advocates said, and emotions on all sides peak and valley as laws are enacted or new mandates are released. However, the discussion in Fairfield has been particularly acrimonious, said Nate Monson, executive director of Iowa Safe Schools, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth advocacy organization.

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“I know of some places around the country and in the Midwest where the discussion around transgender students has been quite divisive, Omaha, for example, but nowhere in Iowa has it been this contentious," said Monson, who attended several of Fairfield’s school board meetings.

The issue has come to a head most often during Fairfield’s school board meetings, where public comments stretched for hours and sometimes featured heated rhetoric.

“If you allow (transgender children) to come into multi-stall restrooms, you’ve taken away the dignity and the respect of them and the other students,” community member Carol Meyers said during a meeting. “What about those who would seek to use this opportunity in a co-ed restroom as an avenue to harm someone else?”

“I do not believe that asking a male to use the men’s bathroom is discrimination or that asking a female to use the female bathroom is discrimination,” said Denver Carlson, a parent in the district.

“How do I explain this to my daughter?” Carlson continued. “How do I protect my children once this can of worms is open?”

After a particularly tense meeting in June, the school board created a subcommittee to write guidelines for transgender students’ use of facilities. Those guidelines — which allow transgender students to use the bathroom associated with their gender identity, but encourage all students to have conversations with administrators about safety and privacy — were passed by a 4-2 vote Monday evening.

Members of Citizens United for Students’ Rights and Liberties group, a community organization that opposes the school's new guidelines, walked out of the meeting after they were approved.

“It’s clear that Fairfield’s transgender policy, which extends to the district’s middle school and three elementary schools as well, endangers the safety and privacy of schoolchildren,” the Family Leader, a conservative, Christian organization, wrote in an article posted to its website Wednesday night. “Girls hesitant to use the restroom or change in the locker room in front of biological males is understandable. Boys uncomfortable with dropping their drawers while a girl is using the adjacent urinal makes sense.”

The Register reached out to leaders of the Citizens United group, but they declined to comment.

Although LGBT advocates and students commended the board for approving the guidelines, many are worried that abiding discontent may spill over into the coming school year.

Mikey Hunt, a transgender male sophomore, said he was bullied, threatened and regularly woke up crying and afraid to go to class during the contentious final days of last school year. If the tension from last year continues, he’s concerned the division between students may turn violent.

“I’m anxious I don’t have Draven,” he said, referring to Spicer, who has graduated. “I haven’t experienced being alone as an out trans kid in high school, (and) I just don’t know what’s going to happen, honestly."

He stopped and looked out his window: “I just have no idea how it is going to turn out.”

'Oblivious' to the issue

On the trip back to Fairfield from St. Louis, Spicer reflected on rooming with the boys, which he thought had gone well, although they’d stayed up too late eating jelly beans. Spicer was mostly looking forward to going home to use the bathroom. He hadn't used the restroom since leaving the hotel, unaware of Missouri law regarding trans people's access to bathroom facilities and a little scared to test the waters.

As he got off the bus and grabbed his bag, he noticed something wrong with his car. When he got closer he realized someone had used chalk to vandalize the windows with drawings of penises and the phrase, “U r a girl.” His friend’s car was tagged, “Gay people suck.”

Many of the cars in the lot had been chalked, but most were decorated with inside jokes or funny drawings, “appropriate messages” between friends or boyfriends and girlfriends, said Superintendent Laurie Noll.

The messages on Spicer's car made him feel like a “rock had been dropped on his chest.”

“My car means a lot to me,” he said. “I can go where I want and I can drive and play music loud and there’s nothing wrong. For someone to come at my car, which has kind of always been my safe place, for me, was just really heavy, and the fact that somebody would do something so angry … was kind of heartbreaking.”

The following week of school was marked by increasing intensity and anxiety caused by rumors and misunderstanding, said Shea Malloy, Spicer's friend who also just graduated from Fairfield. “It was sort of like the game telephone gone wrong,” she said.

On Monday, May 16, divisions began to form between student groups within the school, Malloy said. When Tuesday came, the kids supporting transgender students' right to use the restroom of their gender identity wore black armbands as a way to identify themselves as LGBT allies, Malloy said. But some perceived those armbands as threatening and began to wear red armbands as a sign they disagreed with the guidance. On Wednesday, the two sides wore different colored T-shirts for the same reasons.

Both sides said their members were bullied or harassed throughout the week.

“I was called a ‘devil,’ ‘bigot,’ and ‘homophobe’ because I wore an armband of the other side, red and white for keeping the bathrooms the same,” Simon Spalla, a junior, told the Family Leader. “But I know people who wore no armbands, just trying to keep out of it, were harassed, too.”

Many students spoke of instances where they were victims of social media bullying or disparaging words or experiences. Most incidents were reported to pastors or parents, not to the police or through official bullying channels.

Of the instances reported to school authorities, “every incident was investigated,” Noll said.

Before the end-of-year controversy, no major issues had arisen with the few transgender students using the bathroom of their gender identity, Noll said.

“We did not know that this underlying current was there,” Noll said. “We were oblivious to it. From our perspective, (everything) was going along very well.”

While nothing like this current debate has happened during Noll’s three-year tenure, Fairfield has had its share of bullying issues. With 17 bullying incidents reported in the 2014-2015 year, the school of about 500 students is one of the top 25 districts as far as number of reported bullying incidents, according to Iowa Department of Education data. None of the 17 incidents were reported in the gender identity category, but nine were categorized under physical attributes and three under sexual orientation.

Hunt, who transferred to Fairfield as a freshman from a nearby district, said he had been warned about bullying at Fairfield, but never expected for it to get as bad as it did back in May.

“Everyone was saying stuff,” he said. “I had a lot of people in my class saying how it was disgusting and that if they saw me (in the bathroom) they would beat … me or saying death threats and things like that.”

With summer vacation on the horizon, most students wanted to forget about the situation and enjoy their time off, Malloy said. Her hope was this would blow over.

"But I could tell once parents were getting involved, it was going to become ugly,” Spicer said.

'Areas of significant concern'

At the past three monthly school board meetings, dozens of members of the Citizens United organization have packed the small meeting room and spoken during public comment.

For many members of that group, discomfort with the school’s guidelines focuses on the need for privacy and the concern teenagers could be exposed to the opposite biological sex’s genitalia while using facilities with a transgender student.

“We have no problem with transgender students,” Len Maselli, a leader with the Citizens United group, said before Monday’s meeting. “This is not about the students; this is about the policy and enacting a policy that protects privacy and ensures all students' rights are guarded.”

Many Iowa advocates, including Rita Bettis, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa, have applauded Fairfield’s guidelines, which are largely seen as in line with the Department of Education guidance and the Iowa Civil Rights Act. But she also named a few “areas of significant concern.”

She said the guidelines' language should clarify that transgender students don’t have “special privacy concerns in bathrooms,” but instead want to use the restroom in which they feel most comfortable as all other students do.

“Many students have different issues with their bodies that can create discomfort for themselves and possibly for others,” she said. “No student should be encouraged to be ashamed of their body. And no student should be forced to dress in a private place, because they are transgender or otherwise perceived as different. The policy needs to state this legal fact clearly and simply.”

Transgender students said the idea of equity, not special treatment, is the heart of the issue.

“I just want to go to the bathroom,” Spicer said. “I’m not going to go in there, climb up on the toilet and peer over the stall at your son. Believe me, that is definitely not why I am there.”

'Blending and binding'

The intensity of this current controversy aside, blending cultures, opinions and ways of life isn’t new for this southeast Iowa town, and neither are the growing pains that can come from disparate groups living in close quarters.

In 1974, followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation movement moved into this then-sleepy rural town, bringing a large group of 20- and 30-somethings from the coasts.

There was “a sometimes bumpy blending and binding” between the transcendental meditators and the townspeople, said Ed Malloy, Fairfield’s longtime mayor. It took almost three decades to get to the current state of peace and mutual celebration between the two groups.

“I think the community is better prepared for whatever comes our way because we have been through these things before,” he said.

Indeed, Travis Hunt, Mikey’s dad, who was a Fairfield high school student during some of the bumpier experiences, said any ill will has “sort of breeded itself out” as the two groups got to know each other.

That’s what he would like to see happen with this bathroom issue, too, especially because Mikey is determined to stay at Fairfield.

“I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. I love it,” Mikey said.

For Spicer, high school is over. He doesn’t have to go back, and after the events of last year, he’s not sure he wants to visit anytime soon.

But he doesn’t hold any resentment toward the town or the Department of Education mandate that initiated this controversy.

“Progressive movements always come with some sort of resistance, and I just ended up in a town that reacted negatively,” he said. “I am at peace with that because I know on a larger scale things are still happening.”

He paused: “I might not see it, and my kids might not see it, but the world is headed to a place where everyone will be able to be who they want to be, where they can be who they truly are.”