Loudon County Redux
When the News Isn't Fit to Print
Last week, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote about what had gone down in Loudon County. The Right had run away with a story, she noted, about a girl victimized in a bathroom by a student pretending to be trans—a story the Left had largely ignored. When the details finally came to light, it was clear that the girl had arranged to meet the kid there. It wasn’t a story about a “boy in a skirt” or a gender-fluid kid sneaking up on her in a gender-neutral bathroom. She was still brutally assaulted, but it likely had little to do with the bathroom policy for trans students, which, according to Goldberg, wasn’t even in effect yet.
I was one of those who got parts of the story wrong, although I had argued not against bathroom policies, but against characterizing those who take issue with them as bigots or haters, rather than as people with points worth considering. As you likely know by now if you’ve been reading my stuff, I am not against policies that support gender identity over sex; I am against assuming those policies are inherently better than ones that prize sex above gender identity. I am against the assumption that people who think biological sex matters are not worth hearing from. Thus, what I had suggested was that each story has not just two sides, but multiple sides, and that it’s our job in the media to take a prismatic look at stories involving the clash between sex and gender identity, and that this story was an example of why that’s important.
Well, it wasn’t. Not really.
Even so: Where was Goldberg back when the story seemed to be about a school board not properly handling a sexual assault case because it interrupted a certain ideology about trans kids and bathrooms? When the story disrupted the narrative, the mainstream media was silent.
They’ve been largely silent about detransitioners. They’ve been silent about desisters, who aren’t often counted because even if they’ve gone to a gender clinic and been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they likely don’t return when it resolves. There are no numbers. There are no good numbers, people!
I am just as guilty as Goldberg of confirmation bias. I plucked this story from the wilds of Twitter because it backed up my own theory, that