While Ottawa Police Raise Transgender Remembrance Flag Two Transgender Activists Are Arrested, St. Cloud That Allowed Straight Pride Anti-Gay Tee Shirts Vandalised With Homophobic Graffiti, Minneapolis Catholic High School Student At Centre Of Newspaper Controversy Aims To Start Gay-Straight Alliance Despite District’s Insistence It Will Not Be Endorsed

In Ottawa, Ontario, two transgender activists were arrest for unfurling a banner from a highway overpass to mark the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, the banner reading “Remember Stonewall?” CTV reports that in response to the arrests, an estimated 50 activists assembled at police headquarters to stage a sit-in, Taiva Tegler saying “We want these folks to know that they’re not isolated, that we’re here for them. They were arrested and all they were doing was trying to get their message out. That’s not crime.” Police, who raised a transgender flag at headquarters hours before the arrests, said the two were charged with mischief.

St. Charles North High School in Illinois was targeted with anti-gay graffiti, the Kane Country Chronicle reporting that Tuesday a school administrator notified police about black and brown graffiti that had been spray painted on a wall near the athletics wing. The offending graffiti was erased. The vandalism arrives days after three students wore tee shirts promoting Straight Pride accompanied by Biblical quote from Leviticus that articulates death as a punishment for homosexuality. The three were not punished, and several other students came to school later in the week wearing the same shirts absent the Biblical verse. It is not clear whether there is a direct correlation between the two incidents. Thursday, the school board’s Policy Committee discussed an amendment to its bullying policy that would prohibit district employees and students from harassing or intimidating students based on their “gender-related identity or expression.” The amendment would also prohibit harassment based upon a student’s “association with a person or group with one more of the aforementioned actual or perceived characteristics or any other distinguishing characteristics.” District 303 spokesperson Jim Blaney said that the changed would have been discussed regardless of the recent anti-gay activities at the school since the board is attempting to align its policies with the state Association of School Boards. The committee took no action Thursday, however, because they wanted clarification on the definition of the phrase “gender-related identity” as harassment based on a student’s “gender identity is already including in the policy. The meeting did not discuss the Straight Pride shirts.

17 year old Sean Simonson, a senior at Benilde-St. Margaret School in St. Louis, Minnesota, hopes that the recent controversy regarding an article he wrote for the student newspapers about being gay will help him court support for starting a gay-straight alliance at the Catholic school, Simonson telling the Star Tribune “The goals are not to indoctrinate or push any agenda other than acceptance. I just think that, especially in high school, it’s a very difficult time to go through, and being gay doesn’t make it any easier. They need people to support them.” His article, which accompanied an editorial criticising the Catholic Church’s participation in a state-wide anti-gay marriage DVD, was censored by school administration. Simonson met with the school’s principal last week to discuss the formation of the student support group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and allies by the end of the 2010/11 academic year. There are gay-straight alliances at more than 70 Minnesota public and private schools, according to GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, but according to Dennis McGrath, the spokesperson for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, says that none exist at any of the 13 Catholic high schools, and “that has to say something,” adding “We would not favour it. It’s a lifestyle that we do not endorse.” Simonson is undeterred, saying he will not end his senior year without trying to start a GLBT student group. “There kind of needs to be that openness that there are people at Benilde that are gay, lesbian or bisexual,” he says. “It’s a difficult thing, as this has shown, at a Catholic school.”