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| Tom Pafford |
At a recent meeting with the Annandale blogger, Pafford insisted he is a serious candidate, although he doesn’t have a campaign organization. He says he doesn’t have any volunteers or endorsements, because he didn’t ask for any.
Pafford, a technical writer, will face Ricardy Anderson in the general election on Nov. 5. Anderson, a former principal and teacher, has been endorsed by the Fairfax County Democratic Committee.
Pafford received the endorsement of the Mason District Republican Committee, but the Fairfax County Republican Committee refused to endorse him, he says, because, “I am running on a single bullet point and they want candidates to address other issues.”
He has not yet decided whether to participate in a Mason District candidate forum Oct. 17 organized by the League of Women Voters, but does plan to appear at a Meet the Candidates event hosted by the Camelot Civic Association, Sept. 17, 7:30 p.m., at Camelot Elementary School.
He is also reaching out to voters via email and says, “I think the message I have is a pretty powerful message.”
That message is that schools should require students with gender dysphoria to use bathrooms according to their biological sex, regardless of how they identify themselves.
Pafford warns the Fairfax County School Board is heading toward a pro-transgender agenda in line with other school systems across the county. He cites actions taken by schools in California and Colorado allowing transgender boys in girls’ bathrooms, transgender girls in boys’ locker rooms (and vice versa), inviting drag queens to career days, and reading books to children normalizing the trans lifestyle, such My Princess Boy. There’s much more along this line on his website.
He claims, falsely, that schools identify children as young as age 5 as transgender, if they see a boy play with dolls, for example, and have the child taken away from parents who disagree.
“No one has proved that gender and sex are separate,” Pafford claims, and people who believe they have been assigned the wrong gender are suffering from a mental condition. “The science is sketchy on this issue,” he says.
Pafford says he has a plan to resolve this issue but won’t reveal it until after he is elected.
Although he claims otherwise, the scientific establishment no longer agrees with Pafford’s contention that being transgender is purely a mental illness.
“Gender dysphoria,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, occurs when people are emotionally distressed because they feel their biological sex assigned at birth and gender identity are mismatched.
That definition, adopted in 2013, replaced the term “gender identity disorder” and shifted the emphasis in treatment from fixing a disorder to resolving the mismatch.
The World Health Organization made a similar change in 2018, removing the term “transsexualism” from the International Classification of Diseases and replaced it with “gender incongruence,” meaning transgender people are no longer classified as having a mental illness.
A resource guide endorsed by the national associations representing school counselors, school psychologists, elementary school principals, and secondary school principals urges schools to acknowledge a student’s right to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity and says doing so is critical to their long-term health and well-being.
Fairfax County hasn’t adopted a policy on bathroom use by transgender students, but filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen who sued the Gloucester County School Board after he was barred from the boys’ bathroom.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in favor of Grimm Aug. 9, stating that the school violated his rights under Title IX and the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Pafford acknowledged that he doesn’t have a lot of interest in or knowledge about other issues, although he did say he supports more transparency and opposes raising taxes for schools, because “they always say they never have enough money to do what they need to do.”
But, he says, “all other issues before the school board are tiddly” compared with the transgender issue.