Growing up in deep blue Santa Fe, Dana Tapia didn’t think much could still surprise her. But when her 6-year-old son Levi witnessed inappropriate behavior from a male student who identified as female, she realized that radical gender ideology had infiltrated even the first-grade classroom.
“I thought that this happened more in junior high or high school,” she told IW Features. “We live in Santa Fe, so I’ve definitely seen older adults that live this way.”
According to Tapia, she witnessed the transformation of Levi’s classmate “Rosa”* starting in kindergarten. Initially, she said she wasn’t able to tell if Rosa was male or female.
“I remember that he had short hair in kindergarten, but in first grade it kept getting longer and longer, and then all of a sudden he started wearing dresses and skirts,” she said.
The kindergarten area of Levi’s school has single-use bathrooms, Tapia said, so the issue of Rosa’s gender didn’t arise until first grade, when he started using restrooms meant for little girls.
“That’s when everything blew up,” she said. “I had to have a conversation with Levi about it.”
Although the confusion of a transgender-identifying classmate was distressing, Tapia said that the situation at school became truly untenable when Rosa began to act inappropriately in class.
“Levi told me, ‘Mom, he has hands in his pants, and sometimes he just stares at me,’” Tapia said. “‘There were times where he would pull his pants down and mess around with it. That’s actually how I realized he was a boy.’”
She continued, “You just have to wonder what’s going on at home.”
Tapia said students’ confusion continued throughout first grade as the other young children struggled to understand his gender.
“He would tell some of the girls that he had crushes on them in first grade, and they were confused because they had been told that he was a girl,” she said. “He also came to a girls-only birthday party, where a parent accidentally found out he was a boy.”
According to Tapia, parents were not informed of Rosa’s biological sex due to New Mexico’s Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which prevents schools from sharing a student’s transgender identity with anyone—including the student’s own family.
Eventually, another first-grade parent made a formal complaint to the school for being kept in the dark about Rosa’s identity and behavior.
“I had a really strong relationship with the principal, and she asked me why I and the other parents couldn’t just go along with this,” Tapia remembered. “I told her that we didn’t want to tell our kids a lie.”
Tapia said she later found out that for New Mexico parents who want to socially transition their child at school, it’s as easy as purchasing a new birth certificate from the hospital for $15.
“There is no need to show proof of gender […] that’s how these places are getting around federal requirements,” she said. “If you have to show your birth certificate, they’ll just print you a new one.”
Ultimately, Tapia said that the principal decided there was nothing she could do about the situation without threatening her job security.
“I know that there are teachers who agree with us, but they think, ‘What if they fire me because I don’t want to go along with this?’ or ‘What if I get in trouble?’”
She continued, “A lot of the people in this school are of the opinion that situations like this are a part of life, that we need to be accepting, and that the kids will just have to learn.”
After it became clear that nothing would be done, Tapia chose to pull Levi out of public school and enroll him at one of the only Christian schools in their area, where she said he is thriving.
“People have asked us, ‘Why don’t you just leave New Mexico?’” she said. “But my family is here, and we’re doing the best we can with what we have.”
Despite her commitment to stay and fight for her state, Tapia admitted that sometimes it’s far from easy.
“[Radical gender ideology] is just a strong part of our culture here,” she said. “It’s really, really hard.”
*Name changed to protect a minor’s identity.
