I want you to imagine for a moment that you’re back in high school. You were a child pretty recently and you’ll be an adult pretty soon, but for now, things are weird. Your body and brain are both changing, you smell weird sometimes. You’re in the years-long process of both creation and discovery, carving your own identity out of a formless block of stone, trying to separate what you really like from what you think it would be cool to be seen as liking. Sometimes, you worry that all of your friends might secretly hate you, or that you’re ugly, or that you’re the only one who occasionally smells weird.
Now imagine that a group of adults convenes at your local school board meeting every month to take turns angrily ranting about you. They might not use your name, but you’re the only person you know of in the district who meets the criteria, so, to you, there’s no real difference. They think that you’re an abomination, or a victim, or the spearhead of a Marxist plot to make their kids just like you. The questions you are trying to answer about yourself – which are both the same as, and radically more complex than, the questions all your peers are trying to answer about themselves – are suddenly evidence of an “agenda.” They’re pretty sure your existence defies God, and they want to ban you from playing sports, just in case.
This is reality for trans-identifying kids in districts around the country, and right here in Colorado, where conservative school board members and parents affiliated with the far-right “parents’ rights movement” have latched onto the mere existence of transgender people as a cudgel in their ideological crusade to transform our schools and, with them, our society.
As I wrote a few months ago, I’m focusing a lot of my research and writing this year on schools, and on the well-organized group of right-wing Colorado activists, organizers, and consultants using those schools as battlegrounds for their crusade. For some of the crusaders, the end goal is “school choice,” or the ultimate privatization of the public school system; others are inspired by a libertarian-influenced notion that the existence of public schools represents government overreach; and others still are brought to the crusade by their Christian nationalist convictions that the schools, where children learn what to expect from society, have no business endorsing anything but straight, white, protestantism. For some, it’s all of the above.
Despite their different motivations, each contingent of the “parents’ rights” coalition understands that controlling the public education system is the best next step towards their goals. And each contingent in that coalition seems to have come to the same fraught conclusion, either consciously or not and whatever their motivations, that scapegoating the trans population could be a useful wedge issue in their quest. And so here we are, living in an age when full-grown adults show up to school board meetings, or run for school board seats, to wage war against the existence of a kind of kid they don’t like, often in districts where only 1 or 2 of those kids are enrolled.
It is a political strategy first popularized by groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it seems destined to lose in the long run, given how revolting it is to anyone not already in the club. For now, though, it has seen success and, in unfortunate districts in Colorado and elsewhere, the bullies are still in charge.
Garfield Re-2, north of Aspen along the I-70 corridor, is one of those districts.
“They have these concerns that have been artificially put in their heads that just aren’t real things,” local advocate Ashley Stahl told me, referring to the parents’ rights activists who dominate the district’s board and meetings. “It’s one group taking advantage of a complicated and nuanced issue.”
Stahl, who is transgender, has lived in Garfield County for almost a decade. She was there when Lauren Boebert became her Congresswoman, and when Boebert abandoned that seat for a shinier outlook on the eastern plains. She was there when she transitioned, and she was there when the board of the majority Latino school district started lurching to the right under the guidance of former board president Tony May.
In 2023, she spoke up against the board’s attempt to ram-through adoption of the controversial American Birthright social studies program, which would have made the district only the second in the nation to do so. As so often happens when someone speaks up, Stahl found herself being asked to speak up again and again. Now, two years later, she has found herself not only as a thorn in the board’s side but as a de facto leader in the fight to protect trans rights in the school district, and a volunteer with the local chapter of PFLAG.
She did not set out to be an activist. “It’s really just been by necessity that I’ve been involved,” she told me.
After the failed American Birthright fiasco and his eventual recall by voters, Tony May no longer leads the Garfield Re-2 school board, but his departure has not slowed the board’s roll. Under the leadership of current president Britton Fletchall, the board continues to doggedly pursue “parents’ rights” culture war issues.
So far this year, the board has spent months discussing the district’s name-change policy, which state law requires all districts to implement, but leaves the specifics to district leaders. In conservative districts like Re-2, much of the discussion has been about whether a student can change the name they go by at school without their parents being informed. Opponents of trans rights feel that a policy which lacks mandatory parental notification is tantamount to the school system helping a child “socially transition” behind their parents’ backs, while supporters feel that mandatory parental notification risks forcibly outing students to their parents – and, in some cases, putting them in danger.
“I know this is an issue Britton really wants to take on,” Stahl told me, referring to Fletchall. Despite some efforts to present himself as undecided on cultural issues before the board – like saying he needed to do “more research” on the name-change policy – posts from Fletchall’s personal social media profiles indicate a mind already made up along partisan lines.
In April 2023, Fletchall posted a graphic depicting an American-flag-colored family sheltering beneath an umbrella from symbols representing gun control, the Democratic Party, Islam, Black power, women’s rights, and communism. The next month, he posted, “Can I move my kickstand? I don’t even want my bike to lean left.”
At the board’s most recent meeting, Fletchall spoke out against a bill currently proceeding through the state legislature, HB25-1312, which creates certain legal protections for transgender individuals in Colorado. “I would urge lawmakers and Coloradans to reject this bill and instead pursue balanced policies that affirm both student wellbeing and parental authority,” Fletchall said at the meeting. In the same speech, he made clear that he would also like to see trans-identifying students banned from athletics.
“That issue, in particular in small communities, is one that’s really troublesome and frustrating for me,” Stahl said about the move towards a transgender sports ban. “Because it effectively turns into, from my perspective, a bunch of adults publicly bullying what is almost always just one individual child.”
For Stahl, despite her concerns and despite the bullies, Fletchall’s leadership of the board does not actually reflect the local community she knows and loves. “While there’s a loud group of people who want this extreme-right stuff in our schools, I think the majority of people in these rural areas don’t like the idea of ‘playing politics’ with these things,” she told me. She sees the furor around trans-identifying students as being driven by a small, motivated group doing its best to sow confusion for all the people in the middle, just trying to live their day to day lives.
“This is the case with almost every sort of ideological movement, you have two main groups,” Stahl told me. “You have the people at the top who are really driving the big picture and have goals and aims that they’re pushing towards. And then you have normal people who are living their lives, who are just paying attention to the little snippets they see in the media.”
That’s why Stahl’s focus is more on community than it is on politics. “There are a lot of people out there, most of the people I interact with, who actually care about us and love us and want us to do well,” she told me – a perspective often lost when the frame is only wide enough to capture the activists ranting at school board meetings.
The fight to protect trans rights in Garfield Re-2, and districts around the country, will continue, and Stahl will continue fighting it as it comes. But she doesn’t believe the issue will be solved at school board meetings. She believes it will be solved in real life, by real people, countless of whom are quietly learning to love and accept and build community with people who might not look like the people they knew growing up.
“The big, scary national stuff just isn’t something we can afford to put too much focus on,” Stahl told me. “We need to focus close and locally right now.” And that’s what she’s doing, one day at a time.
When contrasted with Stahl’s quieter, community-building approach, the adults lining up at microphones to scream about trans kids don’t just come off looking petty, silly, and small, they come off as destined to lose this fight in the long run. Because at the end of the day, bullying kids isn’t good politics; winning hearts and minds is. That’s what Stahl is doing.
When I asked Stahl what advice she would give to others trying to do the same, she didn’t hesitate.
“Find community and be community,” she told me. “Those two things, more than ever before.”
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