Letter: On the School Committee’s Obligation to Protect LGBTQIA+ Students

The following letter was sent to the Amherst Regional School Committee on January 18, 2026.

This is an open letter to the Amherst Regional School Committee. On December 9, 2025, at Amherst Regional High School, I was moved by the words of Ali Wicks-Lim, of ROAR, at the school committee meeting of December 9, 2025, to protest any lack of transparency associated with the reinstatement of Delinda Dykes in her role as guidance counselor to the students of Amherst Middle School after her queer-phobic and trans-phobic actions. Wicks-Lim said, “We will not make our children responsible for solving our adult problems.”

My name is James Horne, my pronouns are he/they, and I am a forty-seven year old assigned female at birth trans-masculine human being. I am writing to share my experience as a means to convey my concern regarding Dykes’ reinstatement and the potential impact of her employment.

I was born on August, 4, 1978 in the Northern Suburbs of Chicago. Growing up, I was considered a tomboy but, to me, I was just a boy. The emotional competencies of the ‘70’s, 80’s and 90’s were dismal – I was bullied and experienced emotional and physical abuse in and out of school for my presentation and for my soon to be closeted identity. My mind has done its best to move through these experiences, but my body betrays the work I have done at times. One memory that still resides in my stomach – in school, a group of young girls stood on toilet seats to peer over my bathroom stall while I urinated and with raucous laughter they pointed their fingers at me and chanted, in unison, “ there’s a boy in the bathroom, there’s a boy in the bathroom.” My face was hot with tears and embarrassment. I didn’t understand why they were being so mean to me when I was just using the bathroom that I was told to use. I screamed back at them that I was not a boy and to leave me alone; it was the self-betrayal in my reply that still stings the most.

This particular variety of violence followed me through two moves and through three different school systems across the United States. Instances like this happened frequently enough that I stopped going to the bathroom as much as my body could manage and one day, in a school in California, in 1985, I could not hold my biological need at bay and I let myself go while sitting on a light green speckled carpet in a circle of my peers waiting for the end of day school bell to ring.

My self-hatred was imprinted upon my nervous system when I saw the warmth of my shame beneath my seven-year-old bottom slowly turn that tacky, light green, speckled carpet dark green. Permeating, pervasive shame that accompanied me into all public restrooms and locker rooms throughout my childhood and produced high levels of anxiety that rushed my information hungry brain and impressionable body with cortisol.

In 1998, during the first quarter of my senior high school year, I was told that if I didn’t take the only two credits of gym class that were required, the credits I avoided taking the entirety of my high-school career because my body did not feel safe around other bodies, that I would not graduate. In 1998, my senior year

of high school, it was just four years after I decided to put a part of myself on a shelf and grow my hair to the small of my back to assimilate and to survive my reality.

This anxiety followed me into every public restroom as an adult and only subsided when I could potentially pass as a cis male after starting testosterone injections in 2015. My feeling of safety is ironic considering the potential violence and harm that I face if I’m in the men’s restroom at the wrong time with the wrong cis male that just realized that I am, in fact, not a cis male, something I never try to pass as unless my physical safety depends on it. That is over 40 years of shame, and it will be a lifetime of risk for being who I am, and yet, the threat that I face post-physical transition feels like a relief compared to my childhood experiences, because it is not attached to my value system. It is not embedded throughout my nervous system.

As a kid, I didn’t want to be seen; I checked out. I couldn’t hear my teachers’ lesson plans over the pulse of fear in my ear, asking, “What’s next?” No attention meant I was safe. My brothers and cousins acted like they didn’t know me in the hallways of school, because they didn’t want to be othered, like me. My reclusiveness was obvious and unattended, and the only time it was attended to was when a guidance counselor asked if my parents were physically abusing me at home. No, I was being emotionally and physically abused in your school system. Words my thirteen-year-old self could not find the breath to say.

I went to community college for a month before I dropped out and never returned because academic environments were not affirming and they overwhelmed my body with fear. Despite this, I still managed to learn from the practical experiences of life – I became an entrepreneur and built, owned and operated a successful small business for ten years in Chicago, I have had a rewarding art career for the last five years, I have had beautiful relationships, and I have had loads of fun and affirming experiences. Yet, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, I continue to decondition my smallness and the lack of value my childhood nervous system programmed as truth. Conditioning that shows up in my relationships to others and to myself, betrays the experiences I want to have and reminds me that there is still healing to do.

Adults, we teach kids, explicitly and implicitly, who and what are valued and not valued in our society. We implicitly, explicitly, and somatically teach kids the values of our culture – love, hate, acceptance, ignorance, apathy, cruelty, and so on, and those lessons are wired in a young person’s nervous system and neural pathways as truth. It is the lens we all inherited from our respective and global communities, and we use that lens to make decisions for ourselves, and we see all of our relationships through them for the rest of our lives

You are an integral part of the children at Amherst Regional School District’s community; they look to you to see how they should be treated, how they should treat others, how they should treat other species, and our natural world. It is in everyone’s best interest to treat all children with dignity and respect and to honor who they are and how they identify, and it is your responsibility to make sure these values are upheld at every level of faculty within the Amherst Regional School District.

The decision to reinstate Delinda Dykes into her role as school counselor at Amherst Middle School was not the call of this committee and superintendent, and I know her reinstatement was largely contested by this body, but I am worried about now. Now, she is back in a school system, she is in a position of power, impacting the lives of children, our children without repair, without a public statement from her stating she has changed her queer and transphobic ideology.

This is negligent at best, it is an invitation for abuse and violence and it is to the detriment of our society at worst. This will directly impact the kids who will one day run our schools, our businesses, our cities, our country and build upon our communities, and every person who is employed in any school system should be vetted to ensure that they do not hold any discriminatory beliefs based on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, or disability prior to employment and regular competency testing should exist throughout their employment and, if evidenced that discriminatory beliefs do exist, a clear road to reform, repair and or removal should be established.

Student test scores should be the least of a school district’s priorities. You have accepted the position of stewardship – you signed up for the role of developing a child’s integrity, value system, nervous system, neural pathways, self-esteem, their relational acumen, of which their relationship to compassion, fear, anger, and violence is paramount.

Delinda Dykes has explicitly and implicitly articulated to your queer and trans students that they do not deserve respect, kindness, autonomy and are not valuable. Subsequently, her messaging successfully communicated to your non-queer students that it is ok to treat their queer peers as human beings who are less worthy of kindness, respect, grace, and compassion and to disregard their experience if they choose to. This is violence, and this is abuse.

I implore you, do not subject our children and our society to the repercussions of adult inadequacy – bring full transparency to the reemployment of Delinda Dykes in the Amherst Regional School District by listening to the needs and concerns of LGBTQIA+ community members and prioritize protective policies for LGBTQIA+ students when voting as means to begin the journey to repair for the children and parents that are still in fear of Delinda Dykes.

I had an abundance of childhood experiences that showed me I did not measure up, I was weird, strange, not valuable. I had to emotionally protect myself and I wish I had a school system and faculty who had done that work for me. I wish my teachers were a safe place to seek help. I wish I had an Ali Wicks- Lim who said it succinctly, “We will not make our children responsible for solving our adult problems”

James Horne

James Horne (he/they) is a resident of Worthington, MA.