Catholic High School Courageously Supports Transgender Teacher
Bill Berkowitz printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Wed Jun 29, 2016 at 11:02:41 AM EST
With the nation embroiled in another hot-button culture war issue -- this time over transgender rights -- a Catholic high school in Burlingame, a small city located south of San Francisco, California, is dead set on doing the right thing. Mercy High, a four-year college preparatory school for girls, which is owned and operated by an order of Sisters of Mercy, has fully accepted a transgender English teacher.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle's Jill Tucker, "The announcement of support ... offers a rare policy position on transgender rights from within an internationally respected Catholic order."
The decision to retain Gabriel Stein-Bodenheimer, who came forward to Mercy High School administrators in October, was not made without great deliberation by school officials. "This is significant for us; we did not take this lightly," Sister Laura Reicks, president of the 16-state region of the Sisters of Mercy West Midwest Community, which sponsors or co-sponsors six high schools, told the Chronicle. "We feel because of our values, the choice was this, but that didn't mean it was easy."

"I love teaching at Mercy High School," Stein-Bodenheimer, a Los Angeles native who is Jewish, said in mid-May. "For my own sense of authenticity in the classroom, it was important to name myself, to identify myself, to bring the whole self into the as