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Mesa Unified School Board Meeting: Attend to Stand Against Anti-Trans/Nonbinary Policy
4/7/25
Mesa Unified School District’s next governing board meeting is this Tuesday, April 8, at 6:30PM. One of the first items on the agenda is board member Sharon Benson’s suggested “Gender Dysphoria Policy,” which you can read here.
This policy would jeopardize the safety and well-being of transgender and nonbinary students. It forces parental notification, potentially outing students to unsupportive families, and denies them basic respect like using their chosen names and pronouns.
This policy undermines student privacy, creates a hostile environment, and breaks down the crucial trust between students and educators.
Members of the religious right will be in attendance to demonize and scapegoat trans and non-binary students. We cannot stand by while our most vulnerable students are targeted.
Please act now to protect trans and nonbinary students by attending the school board meeting, voicing your opposition to this policy, and demanding a policy that prioritizes student safety, privacy, and respect.
What you can do:
- Come to this Tuesday’s Mesa Unified School District meeting. Wear a shirt that identifies your values, arrive early, and fill as many seats as possible!
- 6:30 PM Tues, April 8
- Board Room of the Curriculum Services Center, 549 N. Stapley Drive, Mesa
- Contact MUSD board members and tell them you oppose this harmful, bigoted policy
- Phone: 480-472-0201 | en español 480-472-0201
- Email:
- Marcie Hutchinson – mhutchinson@mpsaz.org
- Sharon Benson – sbenson@mpsaz.org
- Lacy Chaffee – lchaffee@mpsaz.org
- Courtney Davis – cdavis@mpsaz.org
- Rachel Walden – rwalden@mpsaz.org
Garnet Henderson: LW v Skrmetti and Healthcare Implications for Trans Youth
Please join us on February 14 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome reporter Garnet Henderson of Rewire News Group. She’ll discuss the implications of LW v Skrmetti on access to healthcare for trans youth.
Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube Channel.
Garnet Henderson is the Senior Multiplatform Reporter at Rewire News Group. Prior to joining RNG, she spent a decade as a freelancer reporting on the intersections of health and culture with a particular focus on reproductive health and abortion access. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Scientific American, Marie Claire, VICE, Guardian US, WIRED, Glamour, Quartz, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her guide to abortion care in the U.S. was part of the Tonic “Guide to Healthcare,” which won a 2018 Deadline Club Award. In 2020, Garnet created ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, which she hosts and produces as a solo project. In 2022, she was one of the inaugural grantees of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Reproductive Rights Reporting Fund for a project that was co-published in The Nation and on ACCESS. Garnet was born and raised in Jackson, Wyoming, and has lived in New York City since 2009.
Arizona Trans Youth and Parent Organization
Join us on November 1 to learn more about the important work of AZTYPO – the Arizona Trans Youth and Parent Organization: https://www.aztypo.com/.
Click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Tami Staas (she/her/hers) is an Arizona native, a professional educator, and a fierce advocate. She currently teaches third grade at Summit Academy, an International Baccalaureate school in the Mesa Public School system. In addition to being a classroom teacher, she is also the Executive Director of Arizona Trans Youth and Parent Organization (Aztypo). In her role with Aztypo, she has been advocating and educating in Arizona on behalf of transgender and gender diverse youth and their families for over a decade. Tami often finds herself providing guidance to teachers, counselors, and administrators on best practices for trans and gender diverse youth in the classroom and around the school.
Tami is passionate about educating the community on how to best serve transgender and gender diverse youth. Over the years, she has worked with various agencies in the greater Phoenix area to foster and create inclusive practices in public spaces such as schools (both elementary and high school), hospitals, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, and community spaces.
Tami has served as the committee chair of the LGBTQ+ subcommittee of the Equity and Inclusive Practices advisory council at the Arizona State Board of Education and is a member of the Learn to Lead team for the Arizona Education Association. She has created and presented training on topics such as raising a trans child and creating gender inclusive classrooms to groups such as the Arizona Psychological Association, the Mesa Education Association,the Arizona Education Association, ASU inservice teachers, the Arizona State Legislature, and many more.
In addition to her education and activist work, Tami is the mother of two children: one who identifies as a trans man and the other who identifies as non-binary. By sharing her family’s journey, Tami has been able to provide guidance, resources, and support to so many families and educators in and out of Arizona.
The Importance of Sharing Stories from Underrepresented Communities
Join us November 15 at noon AZ time as we welcome Kate DeMeester-Lane, Pima County Librarian.
She’ll discuss why it’s so important to share stories that center BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals and communities, fight disinformation, and the essential task of providing and protecting access to information that people use to make important decisions. As libraries come under increasing fire from those who would censor history, disenfranchise and muffle the voices of marginalized communities, and spread mis- and dis-information, here’s one library system that’s fighting back.
Knowledge is power. Click here to watch this presentation on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Kate DeMeester-Lane graduated with her Master of Arts in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from University of Arizona in 2003, and has worked in libraries for over 20 years. She is currently the head of library collections and technology for Pima County Public Library.
The Importance of Gender-Affirming Care w/ Jessica Edmonds FNP, AAHIVS
Join us on July 26th at noon for special guest Jessica Edmonds, FNP AAHIVS, the President and Clinical Director of Gamut Health, for a discussion of the importance of gender-affirming care.
click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Jessica is a licensed family practice nurse practitioner (FNP), certified as a gender care provider with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and as an HIV specialist with the American Academy of HIV Medicine (AAHIVM). She recently launched a telehealth practice focused on gender-affirming care, HIV prevention, and HIV management called Gamut Health (Click here to learn more about Gamut Health). Prior to this, she worked with the Transgender Health Program of St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, one of the largest FQHCs in California.
Jessica is originally from Indiana where she worked with Mosaic Health and Healing Arts, Indiana’s first family medicine practice to be openly accepting of LGBTQ+ patients. In 2017, she presented on gender care at the Sigma Theta Tau International Conference in Indianapolis. Jessica’s passion for this work was really ignited during graduate school; while attending Indiana University South Bend (IUSB), she was instrumental in ensuring the incorporation of transgender and gender diverse healthcare into the curriculum for nurse practitioners and into undergraduate nursing curriculum.
Debunking TPUSA and Charlie Kirk: Dr. Matthew Boedy
Click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Arizona-based TPUSA has been instrumental in promoting Christofascism in our state and around the country.
Dr. Matthew Boedy has been paying attention and documenting their activities for years, an activity that landed him on TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist.”
Matthew Boedy is a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia. He has been writing about Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA since 2018. He’s the author of Speaking of Evil: Rhetoric and the Responsibility to and for Language and May 1970 .
This is Not How Any of This Works
Mesa, we have a problem.
So a friend of mine reached out to me this week to ask for some help with the Mesa Public School District Governing Board meeting because they’ve been taken over by ultra-MAGA, QAnon, Christian nationalists. I wish I could say that she was exaggerating, but…
…she wasn’t. Continue reading
No Scriptures This Week (!) But Still Plenty of Nonsense
It’s the Monday after a Peoria Unified School District (PUSD) Governing Board meeting, so you know what that means… That’s right! I am reliving the hellscape that has become the biweekly meeting happening in the West Valley.
Buckle up, Buttercup, because it was one wild ride of procedural missteps, white supremacy, and fake electors (OH MY!). Continue reading
Elect Clowns, Expect a Circus: Paradise Valley Unified School District Board Meeting
I know I’ve been focused on the Peoria Unified School District (PUSD) meetings lately, and that’s because the repeated violations of the Establishment Clause by sitting board members warrants the attention of Secular AZ.
But! Whether scripture is explicitly being read at meetings by board members or not, there are a lot of Christofascists who are elected or who are showing up at school board meetings all over Arizona. Continue reading
“It’s God’s Words, Not Mine”: PUSD School Board Member
Peoria… I wish I knew how to quit you.
But there are just so many reliably WRONG things happening at your meetings every other week, and our members deserve to know about them. So buckle up, throw some Bailey’s in your coffee, and let’s break it all down.
Because this last meeting was a doozy. Continue reading
The Startling Truth About Religious Refusals: What Your Healthcare Providers Aren’t Telling You
The intersection of law, medicine and so-called “morality” in the U.S. healthcare system poses a serious threat to patients’ access to healthcare and information. That’s the overarching message sent by a panel of experts in medicine and law we convened in December of 2021. As part of our annual Secular Summit event, Secular AZ organized a discussion on refusals of service based on religious beliefs, featuring the following experts and moderated by Secular AZ Legal Director Dianne Post:
- Atsuko Koyama, MD, MPH, Clinical Asst Professor University of AZ, COM, Creighton University; Dpt of Child Health and Emergency Medicine, Valleywise Health Medical Center
- Professor Elizabeth Sepper, Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin
- Dr. DeShawn Taylor, MD, MSc, FACOG, board-certified OB/GYN, clinical professor, and owner of Desert Star Family Planning in Phoenix
You can see the full video here. Let’s summarize what these experts working in the fields of medicine and law have to say about how refusals of service based on religious beliefs affect patients.