A positive school experience

Savannah Tryens-Fernandes of AL.com wrote about a new high school just south of Birmingham, Alabama that is about to graduate its first seniors. The Magic City Acceptance Academy opened last fall and is the first LGBTQ-affirming charter school in the South. It serves grades 6-12. As with other charter schools they accept more than LGBTQ kids. The process to receive a charter was quite long. – they had to go before the charter commission four times. When it was preparing to open the staff thought why would a student want to leave a high school with just one year to go to come here? When 11 seniors showed up the answer was obvious: they didn’t feel safe at their former school. As in really didn’t feel safe. So unsafe they didn’t dare go to a dance and kept scissors handy as protection. Some didn’t dare go to the cafeteria. So this was a last chance at a positive school experience.

In Alabama, LGBTQ youth are three times more likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers, and twice as likely to not go to school because they felt unsafe or experienced violence on campus, according to the state’s most recent youth risk behavior survey. Trevor Project researchers found that “LGBTQ youth in the South with at least one in-person LGBTQ-affirming space, such as a school, had more than 40% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year,” said Myeshia Price, senior research scientist.

And at MCAA they have become a family for each other. In January 2022 they had to go virtual while the omicron variant raged. Once back together they needed to celebrate. So they did a drag show. That included dressing up Social Studies teacher Daniel Evans (who has a transgender child). A week later Tim James, candidate for governor of Alabama, issued a TV ad decrying tax dollars going to a “transgender” school. The ad also called the drag show “exploitation.” Which pretty much proves why the school is necessary. Of course the ad made the students feel a bit more anxious and unsafe. Time to upgrade the school’s security. And five days later the state legislature cut $2.9 million designated for charter schools. The money will instead go to the department of education without designation. 48 hours later the emergency room at the children’s hospital in Birmingham had a big uptick in suicide attempts. That prompted Evans to teach some basic skills, such as how to change a tire so a student doesn’t have to walk a couple miles to a gas station late at night. On senior prom day Lindy Blanchard, another GOP candidate for governor decried taxpayer money going to that “transgender school” when it could be better spent improving mental health and other programs across the state. Yeah, that’s clueless. Giving students a safe school environment is mental health. This sounds like a cool high school to attend. Back when I was in high school all these decades ago I was more than closeted, I was clueless. I made no attempt to figure out why I liked to watch the young men and ignored the young women – well other than the one I “dated” because I thought that’s what I’m supposed to do. I wasn’t particularly upset when she started going out with someone else. At that time a school like this would have terrified me. I had written about the small number of trans kids who do a social transition and then decide to retransition to their birth gender. Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos looked at another study of the number of trans youth who receive gender affirming surgery and then regret it. That number is 1%. Republicans love to talk about trans folks and regret. Are they going to talk about this study? Higgins also explains some of these surgeries. The most important part is:

None of these surgeries, treatments, or processes make someone more or less trans or more or less of their gender identity. You never need to know any of this information in order to respect a person’s identity, which includes using the correct pronouns, providing bathroom access, and so on.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that Russia took two months to grind out the two miles from Pervormaisk to Popasna. The town, reduced to rubble, is now theirs. But now that it’s theirs they don’t seem to know what to do with it. Should they attack north? Or is it west? Or maybe south? Yeah, they capture another village or two, but haven’t put up enough sustained effort in one direction to get anywhere else. Sumner also included a tweet from AP Oddities with a photo showing...

A small brewery in Finland has launched a NATO-themed beer to mark the Nordic country’s bid to join the Western military alliance.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

There's bad news for Russia. Finland and Sweden have both signed off on their bids to join NATO. Finland and Sweden are very serious about making this official—they've each left a toothbrush in NATO's bathroom already. —Stephen Colbert

Charles Jan of the Kos community reported nearly 1,000 Ukrainian soldier who had been in the Azovstal plant in Mariupol are now in Russian hands. Their fate is uncertain. The injured ones were taken to a hospital in the Russian controlled part of Donbas. Ukraine wants to do a prisoner exchange. Russia wants to interrogate them then put them on trial for war crimes. Some of these soldiers were part of the Azov Regiment, a far right group. Russia has declared them to be Nazis. This regiment had recaptured Mariupol in 2014 and had repelled repeated Russian attacks since then. Ukrainian officials say Azov had become part of the Ukraine National Guard and had abandoned its far right origins. Russian social media channels are calling for the Azov forces to be imprisoned or murdered instead of being used in negotiations. The Russian parliament was to consider a resolution banning using these soldiers in an exchange, but didn’t act on it. Kos of Kos referenced translated Russian language accounts of the war to explain that Russia may have a large number of Battalion Tactical Groups on paper. But on the ground that’s an entirely different thing. One BTG is to have 600-800 soldiers, 10 tanks, 40 infantry fighting vehicles and a long list of support vehicles. At the Izyum front estimates say Russia has 22 BTGs. In reality ... a company of 120-160 soldiers actually had 13. Since they are told they’re being sent to sure death, many find a reason not to go. For those who do fight they don’t have enough trucks (no fuel?) to carry them to the front, so it is a several hour march to get there. Which means they’re mighty tired before any fighting begins. Then they have to carry (or abandon) the dead for the long march back to camp. No wonder it takes them two months to capture two miles. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Dara Massicot of Foreign Affairs. After listing a large number of things the Russian Army is doing wrong, Massicot wrote:

These problems do not stop at technical equipment issues, poor training, or corruption. Rather, they are linked by a core underlying theme: the military’s lack of concern for the lives and well-being of its personnel. In Ukraine, the Russian military struggles to retrieve the bodies of its dead, obscures casualties, and is indifferent to its worried military families. It may spend billions of dollars on new equipment, but it does not properly treat soldiers’ injuries, and it generally does not appear to care tremendously whether troops are traumatized.