Last month, Simon Price graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. But his last semester in school turned into an ugly scene after he was assigned a project for a class called “Songwriting and Social Change.” The project was to put together a public event about a social issue the student felt passionate about. White other students did projects about homelessness and eating disorders, Price decided he would talk about his own experience living as a trans person for 3 years before detransitioning.
In middle school, my peers targeted me with homophobic bullying. They called me slurs, threatened me, and made me afraid and uncomfortable in my own body. At 13, I told my parents that I was bisexual. A year later, I declared that I was a girl. I demanded — with the support of my therapist and pediatrician — access to cross-sex hormones…
At 17, I started the long process of desistance and social detransition.
Price went through all the normal steps to complete his assignment. He discussed his plans with his professor. He secured a room to hold the event. He arranged for security and even got funding from the Office of Diversity & Inclusion to fund it. It wasn’t until he took the next step of advertising the event online that things took a turn.
Individuals on Instagram said they were going to throw “expired groceries” at him, demanded that he be kicked out of school, and told him he should be “scared” to host the event.
Students also got 1,998 signatures for an online petition urging the college to cancel the event, claiming it was “expected to harm the mental well-being of individuals in the transgender community.”
On Oct. 17, Amaya Price met with Berklee Vice President and Executive Director Ron Savage, who recommended postponing the event for safety reasons and promised to help Amaya Price find a different venue. But instead, the Office of Diversity & Inclusion posted to its Instagram that the event “will no longer take place as planned on October 20” and will “not be sponsored” by the Office.
On Oct. 21, Savage indefinitely postponed the event.
Indefinitely postponed but not canceled even as the semester was ending and Price was about to graduate. At this point the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression got involved.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sent Berklee a letter on Nov. 1, in which it showed how the school’s decision to indefinitely postpone my event is a breach of the school’s speech code. The college responded nearly a month later, on Nov. 26, with a statement from a lawyer, claiming “it was ultimately postponed due to safety and other logistical concerns.”…
Since Oct. 21, I have heard from countless Berklee students, alumni, and professors who feel that Berklee preferentially protects free speech along lines of identity and political affiliation. The attempts by my classmates and Berklee administration to sweep my event under the rug has, ironically, caused it to receive far more publicity than it would have otherwise. I worked with a number of groups, including Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender and MIT’s Open Discourse Society, to put my event on at MIT. It took place on Nov. 24, and there were nearly 50 attendees at my event and a small protest, but there were no safety issues. What is Berklee afraid of?
We all know the answer to that last question. The school is afraid of the vicious trans activists who threaten and bully anyone who deviates from their approved ideology. Standing up to them would have take a lot more backbone than the Berklee College of Music has. Instead they cowered behind an indefinite postponement, too afraid to even state plainly what they were doing (canceling the event).
The event he held at MIT was filmed and you can watch it here. He details some of the messages he received from other Berklee students. However, this interview below is a bit easier to listen to. Simon explains that he was miserable in Middle School and after spending time on Google decided he must be trans. He announced this to his family but his father said no and refused to let him make any changes to his body. “I hated him for it at the time, but I’m really happy he did that,” Simon said. He added, “Without him I would be in a much worse place today.”
