A University of Central Arkansas student, Alex Barnett, was recently sentenced to 10 days in jail for peacefully protesting a local school board’s anti-trans policies. Barnett was convicted of criminal trespass and failure to disperse after pleading guilty to the charges in Faulkner County District Court in December 2022. In addition to the jail sentence, he was also ordered to pay a $650 fine. Barnett’s case has recently received widespread attention after being reported by Judd Legum for his Substack, Popular Information.
The protest was in response to the Conway school board’s introduction of anti-trans policies that forced students to use bathrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth and banned two LGBTQ+ books, Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin and Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender, deeming them “inappropriate”. A viral video of the explosive school board meeting, where one attendee made derogatory remarks about the LGBTQ+ community, moved Barnett to take action. He organised a group of 20 University of Central Arkansas students to attend a Conway school board meeting in November 2022 and speak out against the new policies.
During the meeting, the group began chanting “trans lives matter”. The police told them to leave, and all but Barnett, Keylen Botley and Colburn Clark dispersed. They were arrested shortly after. Botley took a plea deal and paid a fine of $450 with no jail time, while Barnett chose not to take a plea deal. He claimed the police fabricated their report by saying he intimidated members of the school board, which he says is false.
Barnett’s story highlights the current climate in Arkansas, where there has been an introduction of cruel anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the past year. In March 2023, the Arkansas Senate approved one of the most extreme anti-trans bathroom bills in the US, allowing trans people to be charged with sexual indecency with a child if they remain in the same public changing facility with a “minor of the opposite sex present”. The judge who sentenced Barnett has a long history of Republican activism, and when he ran for the Arkansas Supreme Court, his slogan was “Finally a Conservative Judge”.
Despite the harsh sentencing, Barnett remains steadfast in his beliefs, stating that what he did was “morally correct”. His story serves as a reminder of the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights, which affects not only trans individuals but also the broader LGBTQ+ community.