A South Dakota Teacher Told Students He Wanted to “Rescue” Them From Being Trans

High school students in South Dakota were stunned earlier this week when a teacher handed out letters to transgender students misgendering them and saying they needed to be “rescued” from transitioning.

On Monday, at least four students at Watertown High School, most of them transmasculine, said that they were given a letter by the school’s German teacher, Calvin Hillesland, as the Watertown Public Opinion first reported. A copy of the letter was posted to Twitter the next day by Lee Bruns, a local writer…

“When you asked me to call your friends by masculine names and I started trying to do that, I was wrong. It was a lie,” Hillesland wrote, comparing his failure to “rescue” the students from being trans to a failure to save them from a burning home or rattlesnake bite.

“[F]eelings are like a mirage,” he continued. “You don’t dare trust in them to guide you. They’re not an accurate reflection of reality.” What is real, Hillesland contended, is that the transmasculine students are “female — feminine. That’s the bilogical [sic] truth.”

The letter also references an enclosed piece of candy — “a symbol of the sweetness I hope and pray you’ll discover” — and an unnamed DVD that Hillesland claimed would explain “the spiritual as well as the scientific facts.”…