It woke me up to the fact, that while discussing the politics, I had never really connected the dots.
In our daughter’s elementary school, one of her good friends was a wonderful boy who loved to dress up, preferred to play with dolls, etc. It was a non-issue and it was accepted.
But at the time, I worried how this might play out in the higher grades, with respect to bullying - and was just super happy and impressed to see how our public school system and their teachers embraced him and other kids throughout the years - making sure all kids understood that all kinds of gender identities do in fact exist, are perfectly normal, regardless of their “percentage”.
I had never thought how different things might be elsewhere in the country, where something “normal but different” becomes a taboo that, by law, teachers must be afraid to touch upon.
So that little commentary by that Florida-schooled Barnard student about the effects of her educational experience and the reaction she got about some classes she enrolled in, introduced a sense of reality (and outside of politics), coming from a first-person account, that I simply hadn’t had before.