A woman shocked a school board meeting after using her allotted speaking time to strip off on the podium.
Beth Bourne, a widely-known women's rights activist, took to the podium to speak during a school board meeting at the Davis Unified School Board on September 18.
During the meeting, Bourne protested a locker room policy that allows transgender students to use the changing room which aligns with their gender, as opposed to forcing them to use the one aligned with their sex assigned at birth.
Bourne claims to have gone to the meeting every month for the past three years to protest the policy. And on this occasion, the campaigner took an extreme approach, which saw the meeting halted for a five-minute recess.
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On the podium, Bourne stripped off her clothes down to a bathing suit she was wearing underneath, claiming that this was representative of the discomfort that girls would have to go through if transgender women were allowed to use the changing room.
"I’m a parent in the Davis Unified School District, and I’m here today to talk about the policies you have for the locker rooms in the junior high schools. So Emerson, Holmes, Harper Junior High, Bourne said to the board.
"Right now, we require our students to undress for PE class. So I’m just going to give you an idea what that looks like when I undress."
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"If the adults don't feel comfortable watching someone, and I'm a 50-year-old woman, how can they expect girls to feel comfortable doing that in the locker room?" she added.
"I thought I made a really good point."
She added: "I just thought I would show the school board what it's like to change into your P.E. clothing, and I had a bathing suit on, so everything was covered as far as my body."
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The board adjourned the meeting for five minutes after Bourne began to strip off the first time.
When they resumed, she once again began taking her clothes off on the podium and accused the board members of attacking her right to free speech when they reprimanded her.
Bourne chairs Moms for Liberty, an organisation which began in 2021 to protest against vaccine mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has since called for books mentioning LGBTQ+ people to be banned from school libraries and protested against the teaching of 'critical race theory'.
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Following the incident, school trustee Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald told local news outlet The Vanguard that the police were called when Bourne began to undress a second time.
In a statement, Escamilla-Greenwald slammed the behaviour as 'very inappropriate' and said that the board would be meeting to discuss next steps.
She said: "We are going to be meeting about this, about what to do in such situations, and we’re going to, I know that our superintendent is going to be speaking with counsel to see what can be done because it’s very inappropriate for anybody to be coming before the board and behaving in such a manner.
"It’s very inappropriate."
Topics: LGBTQ, US News, Transgender, Politics
Kit Roberts