Transitioner forced to cancel “Born in the Right Body” event.

A student who used to be identified as transgender faced threats, harassment and cyberbullying for trying to organize an event on his university campus to raise awareness of the risks of gender reassignment procedures for minors.

Simon B. Amaya Price, 20, was tasked with organizing a social change event for a class at Berklee College of Music, a private music school in Boston. He decided to give a presentation on October 20 titled “Born in the Right Body: The Consciousness of Desierites and Detransitioners” to share your own struggles with gender dysphoria in high school and how he overcame them.

After receiving nearly 1,000 negative comments on social media, including messages threatening his physical safety and advising him to drop out of school and commit suicide, the liberal arts college’s administration forced him to cancel his presentation, Amaya Price said. Daily signal.

“The determination and willingness of these people to do everything in their power to essentially harass, abuse and denigrate me is truly extraordinary and does not make me feel safe on campus,” Amaya Price stated.

Amaya price is “landing,“someone who identified as transgender but chose to live as their biological sex rather than undergo medical procedures.

Amaya Price, who has been diagnosed with autism, experienced social ostracism and a mental health crisis in ninth grade, which led him to conclude that his problem was that he was actually a girl.

He told his therapist, who confirmed his gender dysphoria and referred him to Boston Children’s Hospital for hormone therapy and surgery. Amaya Price’s pediatrician told him and his father that they could choose between a “dead son or a living daughter” and that Amaya Price, then 14, would commit suicide if he was denied hormones and surgery.

Fortunately, Amaya Price said, his father immediately rejected the possibility of changing doctors.

“I hated him for it,” Amaya Price said. “But now when I look back, he did the best thing he could have done.”

A college student planned an event for Oct. 20 to raise awareness about the experiences of gender reassigners like him and his friends, and to discuss the dangers of minors consenting to life-changing gender reassignment surgeries.

Berklee’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion department initially sponsored the Amaya Price event, offering funds for food and beverages, as well as emails between the two parties on The Daily Signal.

Amaya Price posted QR code posters on the event website and posted on Instagram to promote its October 15 event. The next morning he woke up to hundreds of negative comments including “go for a long walk off the cliff”, “I’m going to go to this event and I’m going to throw expired groceries at you”, “bro you should be scared on Sunday, what the hell you thought,” “please let it go,” and “terribly disgusting and unsatisfying.”

Several commenters claimed that Amaya Price made up the fact that children are undergoing transgender surgery, even though it came from a database medical surveillance group Do no harm revealed that almost 6,000 children had undergone transgender surgery and 8,579 were given hormones and puberty-blocking drugs.

Other commenters have pushed Amaya Price out of the autistic and “queer” communities. Amaya Price says she identifies as bisexual.

The next day, October 17, Amaya Price met with the school’s vice president, Ron Savage, and the dean of his major, Rodney Alejandro. He says he took his father with him to the meeting and printouts of the threatening comments he posted on his Instagram post.

Given the volume of responses received, Savage recommended to Amaya Price that the event be postponed for safety and logistical reasons. Amaya Price agreed because he feared for his safety after the threats and wanted to find a larger location to accommodate the 117th RSVP.

On the way to Amaya Price’s meeting with campus safety, he said many of his colleagues shouted at him “transphobe” and “TERF,” which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.”

On Monday, Amaya Price posted another Instagram post announcing that the event had been postponed, prompting hundreds of additional negative comments.

He said Amaya Price and his father met with Savage again on Monday, and Savage told him he was “postponing” his event indefinitely.

“This event was intended to be a necessary and culminating project for my ‘Songwriting and Social Change’ class,” Amaya Price said. “The event was approved by my professor, and the fact that Mr. Savage has decided that I am not allowed to attend my event is an infringement on my academic freedom and is a major obstacle to my graduation on December 12.”

Amaya Price’s father, Gareth, confirmed his son’s account of his meetings with the university to The Daily Signal and said he was proud of his son’s courage.

“As for (Simon) saying, ‘I know most people won’t agree with me on this,'” Gareth said, “but I think it’s important and I will say it: it’s the only thing I could count on.”

“Even if I don’t always agree with him,” Gareth continued, “I’m proud of him.”

The school’s DEI department, which Amaya Price said once supported him, issued a statement saying: “We are aware of your concerns and are actively addressing them after conversations with the event organizer. Events will no longer take place as scheduled on October 20 and will no longer be sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.”

On Monday, the day after the event, Amaya Price, the college’s associate director of inclusive learning, invited LGBTQ students to a “Queer @ Berklee” event held Thursday in the same room where the retirement event was to be held. Amaya Price said he expected this to be an opportunity for students unhappy with his event to air their grievances.

Despite the lack of support from the university, Amaya Price said he hopes to find a safe time and place for his event in the near future. Simon plans to graduate in December and must hold an event by the end of the semester to pass the classes.

“It’s very depressing because they made it very clear that I was too diverse for them,” Amaya Price said.

The 20-year-old student said he dreams of a future with a wife and children where his children won’t have to struggle with gender like he did.

“I don’t want to have to worry about, ‘Oh, is my child going to go to the doctor and then have the doctor tell him to take hormones and have life-changing medical procedures?’” he said. “That’s why I do it. I do it to save people.”

Neither Savage nor Berklee College of Music or its DEI department responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.