A woman in California undressed to show her bathing suit during a school board meeting in protest of the district’s locker room policy for “transgender” students.
Parents’ rights activist and Yolo County chairwoman of Moms for Liberty, Beth Bourne, spoke at the Davis Joint Unified School District board meeting on September 18. She aimed to provide a visual example of the process of changing from school clothes into P.E. attire and how the school’s policy allowing “transgender” junior high students to choose locker rooms based on their “self-identified gender” is unacceptable.
Case in point, her demonstration made the Council uncomfortable enough to recess the meeting… twice.
Bourne, 55, a longtime Davis resident and former planner for the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, offered her remarks during the public comment period while removing her clothing, saying, “I’m a parent in the Davis Unified School District, and I’m here today to talk about the policies you have for the locker rooms in the junior high schools. So Emerson, Holmes, Harper Junior High. Right now, we require our students to undress for P.E. class. So I’m just going to give you an idea of what that looks like when I undress.”
Her action prompted immediate objections from board members, who called a brief recess.
When interrupted by the board, she protested, “I’ve got to finish my comments. You are violating my First Amendment right.”
After the meeting resumed, the then-fully clad Bourne argued, “If adults don’t feel comfortable watching me undress, how can young girls feel comfortable in the same situation?”
As she spoke, she began to undress again, leading to a second recess that lasted over 30 minutes.
“If the adults don’t feel comfortable watching someone, and I’m a 50-year-old woman, how can they expect girls to feel comfortable doing that in the locker room? I thought I made a really good point,” Bourne later told CBS News.
“I don’t think it was disruptive. What was disruptive is interrupting my three minutes of free speech,” she told the outlet. “That didn’t stop the flow of the meeting; I didn’t prevent the next person from giving their three minutes of comments.”
Bourne, who has attended monthly board meetings for three years to address locker room policies, said she resorted to drastic measures due to a lack of policy changes.
School board Vice President Hiram Jackson ordered the recesses, and police were called after the second disruption, according to Trustee Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald.
Escamilla-Greenwald stated, “We are going to be meeting about this, about what to do in such situations, and we’re going to, I know that our superintendent is going to be speaking with counsel to see what can be done because it’s very inappropriate for anybody to be coming before the board and behaving in such a manner. It’s very inappropriate.”
Bourne, who describes herself as an “accidental activist,” has shifted her focus over the years.
Once an environmentalist who gave up driving for seven years in the 1990s, she now advocates for parental rights and against “transgender” policies in schools, viewing herself as a mother saving children from a burning home. She supports Republican candidates, including President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, citing their stance on “transgender” issues.
“I don’t want to say I’m a one-issue voter, but I am right now,” Bourne told The Sacramento Bee.
Despite facing threats and criticism, she remains undeterred.
She hopes her legacy will be seen as “somebody who wasn’t afraid to almost lose everything to try to get my message out.”
In this case, Bourne was literally losing her clothing to protest school policy, bringing into view, literally and figuratively, the discomfort that some students may experience when being compelled to participate in policies that accept “transgenderism,” which she believes could compromise children’s well-being and safety.