LGBTQ activists tried to force The Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts (FWAFA) in Texas to allow boys to join the Singing Girls of Texas choir.
Following public comment, the school board shot down the effort in a 4-2 vote.
Activists had pushed for gender identity to be used in determining which choir a child may be placed in, but the board ruled in favor of using biological sex as a marker to separate the choirs.
Per Fort Worth Report, “Students planning to audition for the famed Texas Boys Choir or Singing Girls of Texas will now have to provide an unaltered birth certificate before trying out for the group that matches their sex assigned at birth.”
As part of the vote, the board changed the school’s handbook to define “boy” and “girl” based on the child’s birth certificate. That original certificate must be presented as proof of biological sex to join The Texas Boys Choir and The Singing Girls of Texas.
Changes to the handbooks for the Texas Boys Choir and Singing Girls of Texas were addressed in two different votes. In both instances, the FWAFA board voted favor of changing the language related to both choirs.
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The rule was looped into a process for annual reviews of the choir handbooks. FWAFA is a public charter school and the home of both choirs. The Texas Center for Arts and Academics governs it.
After the vote, conservative group Citizens Defending Freedom shared, “This is another great win for kids and parents in Tarrant County,” said Kenya Ayoub Alu, executive director of Citizens Defending Freedom – Tarrant County. “We’re simply standing up for common sense. Boys should not be allowed to sing in the girls’ choir, and girls should not be allowed to sing in the boys’ choir. A simple solution would be to establish a co-ed choir in addition to the girls’ choir and boys’ choir. To us, it is absurd that we even have to have this debate, but as long as the liberal activists keep pushing their agenda, we will keep fighting back.”
This comes on the heels of a vote in late June by the Keller Independent School District barring boys from girls’ restrooms, and to stop students, faculty and staff from using preferred pronouns.
According to Tarrant County Citizens Defending Freedom Executive Director Kenya Alu, the Keller ISD School Board mandated that only biological boys could use boys’ bathrooms and that only biological girls could use girls’ bathrooms.
Alu said that the school’s pronoun usage policy has also been updated, and now says that employees of the district “will not promote or require the use of pronouns that are inconsistent with an individual’s biological sex as it appears on the individual’s birth certificate.”