MoCo pride is the first LGBTQ student association in Maryland’s largest school district. Montgomery County Public Schools lists the group as an LGBTQ resource for students, and MoCo Pride says in its constitution that it is “under the sponsorship of Montgomery County Public Schools.” The group is advised by MCPS’s Director of Student Leadership and Extracurricular Activities, it claims in its bylaws, and has ties to MoCo Pride Center, Youth Creating Change, Montgomery County Parent Teacher Association, GB Youth Media, and Free State Justice, which are all local or national LGBTQ organizations.
An established LGBTQ student group is no surprise in Montgomery County — where students as young as kindergarten can join Rainbow Clubs or Gender and Sexuality Alliances, and where the district requires students to read and discuss lewd LGBTQ books — but MoCo pride is of particular interest.
First are its comprehensive pronoun and orientation guides that chronicle innovative terms. “Achillean” describes a “man or enby who is attracted to other men and enbies, but who may or may not be attracted to other genders,” MoCo pride says. What’s an enby? The group defines it as “an umbrella term for any gender identity that doesn’t strictly fall into the male/femake [sic] binary.” And, in case you were wondering how that identity translates into sexual orientation, to be enbian is to be of a “diamoric orientation,” which just means “an enby who is attracted to other enbies, but who may or may not be attracted to other genders, AKA Dionysian.” Diamoric is a made-up orientation that first emerged on Tumblr in 2016 in “an ‘ask’ post from the user jesse-mccree to Marlowe Lune”:
jesse-mcree replied to your post “feuillyadeux replied to your post “i wish there were cool words to . . .”:
Dionysus is a partier who has some strong gender queer and poly themes right? how about gender queer attraction being DionysianHoly s***. . . *heart eyes*
Is this NB loving NB people? NB people loving anyone?
This is actually a really cool concept because NB people have such a hard time using existing labels to describe their attraction because most current labels were incarnated to describe a binary.
MoCo pride also deserves recognition for its political activism. Student organizations don’t hold much sway over school districts, at least not without administrative support. Student groups in the liberal district of Montgomery County, for example, are rife with activism in part due to progressive administrators who are more than willing to legitimize delusion. MoCo pride collaborated with district staff on the county’s first LGBTQ elective course for high schoolers, the first course of its kind in the country, an MCPS student newspaper reported in 2020.
MCPS endorses LGBTQ-friendly language to help students feel safe, the district claims. “Safety means telling students that they’re valued members of the community, and their backgrounds are valued,” former MCPS chief communications officer Derek Turner said in 2020. The wealth of LGBTQ resources available to students that helps them feel “safe,” however, certainly doesn’t translate into physical safety. The district’s arrest rates, violent crime, and antisemitic hate crimes are all on the rise, and have been for the last few years.
Parents recently sued the district over its gender and sexuality curriculum that forces children to read explicit LBGTQ books. The next step should be to demand that the district stop sponsoring absolute madness in student organizations.