Roger Bowen lives in Gouldsboro, which is part of RSU 24.

I was still in grade school when the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) advanced the freedom of Black Americans. I vividly recall the anger my conservative, middle-class Midwestern parents openly displayed toward the court. I remember asking them why they were so upset.

My mother explained that their values were shared by their friends and all believed these values are what made America great. She amplified this by telling me that when she was my age, Black people knew “their place.”

My parents respected the decision by Alabama Gov. George Wallace to disallow Black people from admission at the University of Alabama and decried “federal interference” that forced Wallace to back down. They despised LBJ and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as unwholesome interference in “the natural order of human society,” which for them was as much driven by race as by class and is most certainly Darwinian.

Black people, they believed, stood at the low reach of the social order. When Black families began moving north, my parents moved father north, to an all-white suburb.

Something similar is currently playing out in Maine today. Instead of persecuting Black people for being Black, Maine is persecuting those who seek affirmation and respect for their gender identity.

The school district in our area, RSU 24, recently became the seventh or eighth one statewide to ignore the code of human rights adopted by Maine and other states, which clearly affirms the right of citizens to change gender.

Federal involvement started with one of President Trump’s first executive orders, signed shortly after he was inaugurated, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism & Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Under this order, Title IX protections are scuppered, thus permitting discrimination against nonbinary and transgender students, excluding them from access to bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic teams.

Of course, it is also a “biological truth” that advances in science have made sex mutable, but that is immaterial, especially in red states, once truth is sacrificed on the altar of political conservatism.

Transgender students, in my mother’s terms, need “to know their place” and if born males become females, the presumption is they will have an unfair advantage in athletics, hence the need to “defend women.” No mention of defending a woman’s reproductive rights or from systemic gender inequities in the corporate world or in the treatment of a mother’s health, not to mention Trump’s predatory behavior toward women.

I wrote to the superintendent and school board chair about one likely ramification, namely a lawsuit initiated either by a trans student or her parents, and pointed out that Maine’s Human Rights Act forbids discrimination against these children. (Yet, sadly, the state’s Human Rights Commission decided earlier this year that it would not take action against school boards that adopted this form of discrimination.)

Our local school board chair wrote back to me, saying that the U.S. Supreme Court will likely be the final arbiter. I also appealed to her libertarian leanings, making the point that freedom for the school board to discriminate against the freedom to choose is contrary to American democracy. Deaf ears, so far.

Freedom for the shark means death for the minnow. Some parents have deluded themselves into believing they have to “protect” their children from imagined indignities in the bathroom or on the athletic playing field. I suspect parents in the 1950s, similar to my own, justified segregation of the races for a similar purpose.

Expanding freedoms to all Americans is a struggle. Trans students and their parents need to understand that they have allies around the state willing to help stop such retrograde and callous treatment of kids who might feel alone and isolated.