On, January 31, my husband and I arrived at Nashua High School North an hour before the Nashua Board of Education meeting and stood outside holding signs.
I was carrying a 4-foot-sign that said “No Puberty Blockers” and my husband’s sign was an oversized image of the cover of the book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigail Shrier.
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Soon after, more than 50 Nashua teachers and their supporters started arriving with signs demanding that the Board of Education acquiesce to their contract demands. They lined the walkway to the school to greet the members of the Board and the parents who came to watch the meeting and give public comments.
The conflicts started almost immediately with one arriving teacher telling us “Our school doesn’t promote that.” I pointed out that a large Pride/Trans/BLM flag is hanging on the wall opposite the auditorium where the meeting was being held. Another told us “Our union doesn’t support that.” We explained that their union does support the medical transition of kids.
A teacher stood in front of me with her back to me so as to block my sign from view and then walked backward quickly using her body to push me off the sidewalk. After I yelled a number of times “Don’t touch me!” someone convinced her to step away and leave me alone.
One teacher was especially upset with us and told us that she put her child on puberty blockers and she insisted that if she hadn’t done that, her child would have committed suicide.
A number of teachers told us that we didn’t belong there. They demanded “Why are you here? This isn’t about that. This is our rally.” When we tried to explain that it is a public place and that we had just as much right as anyone to be there, they were unconvinced.
State senators Lou D’Allesandro and Cindy Rosenwald stood near the front and they graciously allowed me to take their picture. However, when I tried to take former state senator Melanie Levesque’s picture she was furious and rushed at me with her sign aimed right at my face as if to hit me. She stopped just short and I got it all on video.
The next day I and my sign showed up in a picture that the Nashua Teachers’ Union posted on their social media. After I tweeted the picture, I was blocked by the union Twitter account and the picture was deleted from their social media.
We knew that teachers’ unions were demanding and difficult. We didn’t know they would be physically aggressive and try to shut down our freedom of speech.
