What We Should Learn from Loudon County

It's not about vilifying trans people; it's about the loopholes in the law that make girls vulnerable — BUT SEE UPDATES BELOW!

creative commons/Platformspace

UPDATE: Since I wrote this there have been significant updates in this case, and it’s clear that I, like many people, didn’t have the full story. In fact, it’s pretty hard to know what the full story is. But an article in the Washington Post indicated that the girl involved in this case, and the boy who raped her, had agreed to meet in the girls’ bathroom. Thus, very little of this might have had to do with bathroom policies for gender-diverse kids, and about the loopholes in such policies that are easily exploited, as I write about below. Though it has plenty to do with how [badly] schools handle incidences of rape and sexual assault.

But this story in ArcDigital (a Libertarian outlet, apparently) makes another salient point, which is that the mainstream media was so frozen by the prospect of the bathroom policy going awry that they didn’t cover it at all, leaving a right-wing outlet to exploit fears about trans kids in bathrooms and run away with the story.

Interestingly, the original story in the Daily Wire also said that the father, Scott Smith, was arrested after disrupting a June 22 meeting about the bathroom policies, but this video shows the footage of him being handled by police during a fiery meeting about critical race theory, which was, according to the Washington Post, the same meeting.

So let’s be clear: I got this wrong. But my longstanding criticism of how the center and left media reports on this subject is as relevant as ever, and so is my assertion that we must allow and listen to dissent.

---

Last week, we got to see another side of a story that we’re often told has no other side. What had been cast as a tale of a hateful man—opposing bathroom policies that supported students who identify as transgender—turned out to be much more complicated. Much, much more complicated (as the story always is when you’re willing to look deeper).

Back in June, Scott Smith, the father of a 15-year-old daughter at a Loudon County, VA public school, caused a ruckus in a meeting about said policies, and was arrested. But Smith later revealed the reason for his objections: His daughter had been raped by a male student wearing a skirt (I do not know how this child identifies) in a gender-neutral or girls’ bathroom (reports differ). The school superintendent is alleged to have known of this incident, yet claimed that the bathroom policy posed no threat, and that there had not been assaults in the bathroom.

I’ve never thought the arguments over who gets to use what bathrooms were just about trans people. From the objectors’ side, they have often been about who will exploit laws and policies that allow self-ID—declaring oneself a boy or girl, man or woman (or otherwise) regardless of sex, with no oversight and no objective criteria for that declaration.

Rarely do I find anyone saying these trans bathroom policies are dangerous because trans people are dangerous. Rather, people know that humans have a tendency to take advantage of loopholes, and these policies have a big ole loophole: Some men and boys will take advantage in order to have access to women and girls in ways they otherwise would not. In fact, that’s just what Scott Smith said was happening.

For another example, remember Wi Spa? Oh, right. Maybe you don’t, since the mainstream media declared it a hoax. But in fact, it was the story of a serial sex offender exposing himself (not sure what pronouns to use, be offended if you must) in the women’s changing room. The women who objected were painted as transphobic, when what they objected to was a male showing his semi-erect penis to women and girls in a women’s-only space.

Many rallied to the, er, penis-holder’s defense because if she is trans she is vulnerable, and if he isn’t, he’s, well, mentally ill. Of course, someone can be both, and identifying as trans doesn’t mean that you are morally superior in some untouchable, unassailable way. But trans people are often depicted by the media as so fragile and vulnerable that they can’t be questioned or challenged at all.

And this is where the self-ID argument gets, and should stay, complicated. The sole criterion for being transgender is that you say you are, but there is no consistent definition of what trans means. Sometimes we say a transgender person is someone with a gender identity different from their sex. Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History, defines transgender people as those “who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture.”

That, of course, can include men in skirts. There’s nothing wrong with a man in a skirt. There is something terribly wrong with a man wearing a skirt to prey on women. And something terribly wrong with men exploiting a law to do that because the fuzzy meanings of words and ideas make that so easy.

While these policies may be intended to liberate trans people, they can be abused to hurt women and girls. Even if that does not happen frequently, it does happen. When we make policy we have to acknowledge those possibilities and sometimes shift the policies accordingly, and not only consider one group’s needs.

Assuming that anyone is trans who says they are, and that every such person is both vulnerable and incapable of causing harm, obscures the reality that multiple and competing needs must be addressed. As far as I know, there is no easy way to weed out the predators in a student population, hence having certain safe spaces for women and girls. But there are plenty of gender nonconforming people who are vulnerable to violence in places like bathrooms and they need safe spaces, too.

Meanwhile some people identifying as trans are claiming they can’t be anywhere near a bathroom with cisgender men—perhaps to make a point, or perhaps because they have been taught that being made to feel uncomfortable is an egregious violation.

I have no idea what the answer is. I do know that dragging a devastated father from a school board meeting because his political views are presumed to be unpopular prevents us from discussing what should have been brought up from the get-go: the potential downsides. There are costs and benefits, and a student being raped is about as big as a cost as it’s possible to pay. Worse—worst, the absolute worst—is that the boy was allegedly released from juvenile detention during the investigation and transferred to another school, at which he sexually assaulted another girl in a classroom months later.

As usual, this was largely ignored by the left-wing media, though some local Virginia mainstream media did pick it up. The left media’s silence on this issue is, at this point, complicity. Smith and his wife are now suing the school board. In the case of the Loudon County schools, one group’s needs was considered far more than another’s, and that’s not good policy.