How a Transgender Super PAC Muscled Approval of School District’s Radical Locker Room Policy

Two girls walk into de locker room after attending a training session at the Anorga KKE fo
ANDER GILLENEA/AFP via Getty
Dr. Susan Berry

A transgender Super PAC influenced the election of Chicago school board members who approved a radical new policy allowing students who claim to be transgender unrestricted access to locker rooms regardless of their biological sex.

Board members of Chicago’s Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 voted, 5-2, this month to end the requirement that transgender students use privacy stalls and thereby allow biological male students to undress in locker rooms alongside biological females.

PJ Media drew attention to a blog post at Illinois Family Institute by Laurie Higgins, who wrote in September about the influence in the district’s school board elections by the Super PAC known as Trans United Fund Illinois, which is the Illinois independent expenditure committee of Trans United Fund.

“Local communities no longer control their own school boards and, therefore, their schools,” Higgins wrote ominously.

Trans United describes itself as a “nonprofit that partners with visionary transgender leaders and organizations to build the collective capacity of the trans community and to improve the lives of transgender people, our families, and our allies.”

Higgins observed that in March 2017, LaSaia Wade, a Trans United board member, and Daye Pope, organizing director at Trans United – both biological men who claim to be female – set up Trans United Fund Illinois.

As Higgins went on to report, Trans United Fund Illinois was effective in electing District 211 board member Kim Cavill in April of this year, and other board members in 2017.

During debate about the proposal to end the requirement that transgender students use privacy stalls, Cavill referred to the rule as “discrimination.”

“Discrimination is never an acceptable compromise,” said Cavill, who describes herself as a “sex educator” at her website called teaandintimacy.com.

Cavill offers “Six Minute Sex Ed” podcasts on her website, with titles such as “The Islamic Rights of Wives and the Art of Teaching Pleasure;” “Revenge Porn;” and “Masturbation.”

Higgins added:

From her podcast for tweens and teens on anal sex titled “All About Anal”:

Before trying anal sex, people need to talk about their own and their partner’s boundaries like any other type of sex. It should be preceded by a conversation about what the people participating in sex are consenting to, what they aren’t consenting to, how they’re expecting sex to go, and how they’re going to communicate during sex to make sure everyone’s still on the same page. Anal sex also requires a lot of lube.

From her podcast for “tweens and teens” titled “Let’s Talk About Porn”:

Porn can certainly cause relationship problems but so can a lot of other things. Porn causing relationship problems isn’t inevitable, it depends on the relationship and it depends on how the people in that relationship feel about porn…. [T]he evidence says that if you think porn’s bad, it is, and if you think porn’s fine, then it is.

Two days after Wade and Pope set up the Illinois Super PAC, Higgins reported Cavill and her sister Lindsay Christensen set up another Super PAC called Parents and Neighbors for Quality Education (PNQE).

Higgins reported that just days after Trans United Fund Illinois was founded, thousands of dollars “came pouring in,” much of it from LGBTQ activists, and with more than $26,000 from donors outside of District 211.

According to Higgins, the donations from outside the school district went to Cavill’s PNQE.

She concluded that Cavill and her sister set up PNQE because state law requires that campaign fliers and yard signs identify who pays for them and “approves” them.

“Which sounds better—and by ‘better’ I mean less likely to arouse suspicion: ‘Approved by Trans United Fund Illinois’ or ‘Approved by Parents and Neighbors for Quality Education?’ she quipped in her post.

In 2017, Trans United apparently agreed to help Cavill and her sister defeat the three school board candidates who supported single-sex locker rooms. The smear campaign then began.

Chicago’s LGBTQ newspaper the Windy City Times printed a press release by Trans United Fund, which stated:

“A mom from the district reached out to us for help,” said LaSaia Wade, a Chicago-based board member of Trans United Fund. “She shared that local parents and students had been battling a network of national and state hate groups on their own. They were up against a ‘hate slate’ of candidates intent on taking over their local school board and rolling back protections for trans youth. But we knew that if the opposition won, it would mean more violence and bullying for LGBTQ students and any kid that’s different. The timeline was short and our resources were already stretched thin, but we weren’t going to let that happen.”

Trans United Fund (TUF) and a group of local parents, youth, and allies, worked together to launch the first trans-led, trans-focused independent expenditure in history. TUF assembled a powerful team of thoughtful allies to quickly build and execute a research-informed and strategic plan to help the parents and youth get their message out. TUF supported the parents’ efforts through digital, mail, phone banking and helping to train volunteers to reach their neighbors at the door.

“We are just a group of parents who love our kids and believe deeply in humanity and equality for all. We are fed up with this small group of vocal, transphobic people guided by a national hate group wreaking havoc in our community and trying to dismantle supportive practices in our schools. Our District 211 community will not tolerate adults bullying kids or intimidating us for one more day. The ADF-inspired slate of candidates ran with the agenda of inserting a hate-based, national agenda into our schools. They didn’t care that their policy changes would increase bullying and violence against kids. We needed to stand up and fight to maintain quality education and inclusion in District 211, but we lacked the campaign experience and financial resources of our opposition. So we reached out to Trans United Fund and they helped us to get our message out to our neighbors and community members. When they understood what was happening, voters in our community overwhelmingly rejected politics of fear and hate exactly 3 out of 3 times.” said Tracey Salvatore, a local mom from District 211.

The upshot of Trans United’s influence in the 2017 local District 211 school board election is that three qualified individuals who opposed biological male students dressing with biological females were defeated by three people who support transgender ideology.

Two years later, in April 2019, Cavill ran for the District 211 board herself and won.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.