Like I said, I don’t know that much about this specific event, but Osseo is the neighboring school district to mine, and I can add a certain amount of context.

In this area, the western suburbs of Minneapolis, there are a couple of gradients. One is the gradient across population density, going from dense city-like suburbs right next to Minneapolis, to the west, to less and less densely populated suburbs, to farmland. I live near the outer boundary of that gradient.

Then there is the south to north gradient running from the big lake that the rich people live on (in the south), running northward to where the landscape becomes less interesting, the wealth drops considerably, and the population becomes mostly working class. Far enough north-ish, and you are in Anoka. A major source of humor around here is comparing the hicks from Coon Rapids (where I lived for several years) with the hicks from Anoka.

Osseo School District, which overlaps with the town of Osseo (school districts in Minnesota are named after towns, but are only vaguely geographically connected to those towns, outside the big cities), is in Hennepin County. Up north of Hennepin County, out on the edge of that second gradient, is Anoka County. Hennepin County includes the most progressive urban zone in the United States outside of Cambridge, Mass, and overlaps with Minnesota’s fifth Congressional District. If you know your congressional districts, that will be meaningful to you. Anoka, on the other hand, is mainly in the sixth Congressional District. Remember Michele Bachmann? Yeah, that district.

So, Imagine Hennepin County and Anoka County combined, and subract all the wealthy high end school districts like Wayzata (top school in the state, go Trojans!), remove Minneapolis, and so on, what you’ve got left is something that does not quite meet Lake Woebegon standards of Minnesota Nice. What you’ve got lefy is a high proportion of working class people, mostly conservative, sexist, anti-gay, Trump-loving Michele Bachmann supporting, crackhead yahoos and their families.

OK, maybe I’m characterizing the region a bit too harshly. But it is mostly Michele Bachmann land, where people on average really hate Transgender folk.

The Anoka-Hennepin School District is one of the largest districts in the state, geographically. It is the district that served the population I just described. Hennepin and Anoka Counties minus the civilized city and the la-la-chi-chi upper end suburbs, and minus some other districts, like Osseo.

Anoka-Hennepin was nearly shut down a few years ago by the US Center for Disease Control. Why did the CDC want to shut down Anoka-Hennepin? Because too many students were dying there. Looking at the statistics for a certain cause of death across America’s school districts, Anoka-Hennepin had one of the highest rates of death. That alarmed the CDC, so they went in and said, this gets fixed or we shut you down.

And what was the cause of death that had become alarmingly common in the Anoka-Hennepin School District?

Suicide, disproportionally by LGBT kids who were being bullied by both student and staff. And, the staff policy for addressing this bullying was to ignore it. That was the actual policy. Let it go all Darwinian.

The Osseo School District is geographically within the overall range of Anoka-Hennepin, similar to the rest of it, and is culturally roughly the same. This is also where Trump-loving deplorables were displaying Nazi symbols right after the 2016 election. It is also a place that includes a large mostly white neighborhood and a large mostly non-white neighborhood, but has gerrymandered the school district positions to make sure the latter is never represented on the school board.

Here’s the video of the Osseo staff busting into the bathroom stall to harass this young transgender student:

A transgender female student @ Osseo Senior High was ostracized by administration, violated, and put out of school for using the Girl's bathroom. ?

Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/Pkh46MAjJP

— Kenidra4Humanity (@KenidraRWoods_) November 29, 2018

Shame on Osseo.

See:

One Town’s War on Gay Teens (this is a Rolling Stone article that blew the lid off the Anoka-Hennepin problem)

Eight Suicides in Two Years at Anoka-Hennepin School District

String of teenage suicides in Michele Bachmann’s Minnesota backyard linked to anti-gay bullying

One way to convey your willingness to stand up against bullies is to were some kind of button or pin or label or something that says something like “safety” on it. And when you think about it for a second, why not just wear a safety pin???

Most of the safety pins we had around the house are tiny and nobody would see them if I wore won. So I found some larger ones on line.

The really big ones start to look a bit less like regular safety pins. May be it is a good idea to wear two. I don’t know.

Anyway, here is what I found:

This is a 3 inch steel safety pin, shiny, pretty obvious, large, and comes in a package of 122.

It is listed as: 12pcs Silvery Extra-large 3″ Steel Safety Pins – Blankets, Skirts, Kilts, Crafts

Something that big might have the downside of damaging the clothes it is attached to. On the other hand, it is so large you can probably sew it onto something, like a hat. Or attach it to your car. Let me know if you have ideas.

Here are some even larger ones, but they look even less like safety pins.

Then there are these, which look like normal safety pins, but they are not as large. Listed as: Set of 100 Extra-Large 1-3/4″ Safety Pins.

This might be ideal for a teacher, who might wear it as a lapel pin or small broach. It won’t be noticed from across the room at any particular instant, but the teacher’s students will by and by see it and know that this teacher is on their side in case of any bullying, regardless of what the nature of that bullying might happen to be.

By the way, the wearing of safety pins to signal opposition to racist abuses started in the UK after Brexit, according to this.