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Right-wingers outraged after school district suspends boys for bullying trans student
(www.thepinknews.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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It sounds like there wasn't a girl in the locker room, but a trans boy.
I'm not saying that isn't awkward, but your perception of events aren't exactly accurate either.
I'm trans personally, and I think the solution to this is more gender-neutral spaces. If I use the men's room, I make men uncomfortable because I'm a woman. If I didn't pass, I might make folks uncomfortable in the women's room instead.
The issue is the gender binary and our cultures discomfort of anything outside it. Not that a trans boy was more comfortable in the boys locker room.
That said, I don't think the trans boy should have been filming. I get the he wanted to catch the harassment on video, but an audio recording would have served the same purpose.
To be fair, the big WTF to me was that the trans boy walked into the locker room to film the reactions. I think breaking out the camera in any locker room by anyone would be considered unacceptable.
True. My guess is that this is something that has been consistently happening to him. Knowing how schools slow-roll harassment and bullying compliants (unless it has been massively reworked in the last 20 years) he probably saw video evidence as the only way to force the staff to intervene, and was willing to accept the risks of filming the incident.
Teenagers are tricky, could have been to document unjust harassment, or it could have been to ragebait the other kids. Without having seen the video, I've no idea which way it went, and even then might be impossible to know without broader context.
Makes it very difficult to fairly cover a potentially nuanced situation since the privacy of underaged kids is important, so we are left with vague second hand reporting.
Sure sure,
On the flipside though, if this student had been verbally and physically harassed multiple times while in the locker room while staff ignored his complaints, then he may have felt compelled to film simply to prevent worse harassment from occuring.
Clearly, there is more going on than what information is publicly available.
I agree completely and I'm impressed that you were so cordial with @Bytemeister@lemmy.world
You sound like they shouldve been rude instead.
No, I think I got it alright.
I imagine some girls would be equally as uncomfortable with this boy in their locker room. From the perspective of those other boys, there was a girl in their locker room. We need to teach understanding that trans people exist, and they need to use bathrooms and locker rooms as well.
I'm with you on having more availability of gender neutral locker rooms, but until schools either integrate all locker rooms (unlikely, seeing how parents have reacted) or build a 3rd locker room (equally unlikely IMO) then we need to teach about how trans people feel, and replace fear and discomfort with understanding and acceptance.
I was referencing specifically this part of your post.
But I agree with your take overall. And see that in the quoted text you were referencing the boys perceptions. But it also sounds like this harassment was ongoing, hence the trans boy feeling the need to record it. Calling him a girl was likely part of that harassment. They likely know he's trans. But are learning a lot of exclusionary rhetoric from their peers and likely adults too. Which they used to harass and exclude the trans boy.
We need education, inclusion. And yeah, safe gender neutral spaces too.
In fairness to my past self, a locker room was a place to change my clothes and get out. I was uncomfortable being in there with anyone for any length of time.
I'm trying to take a view from the other boys, who see him as a girl. You can't reasonably expect people who've grown up in a society where they're is a binary assignment between boy and girl at birth to suddenly understand and accept a trans person, without some kind of education, coaching and adjustment period. From the other boys perspective, this student was a girl, and he just came into the locker room and started filming them. If I went into a women's locker room and started filming, I probably would get a police escort out of the building with some shiny new bracelets. There are two sides to this story. I'm not saying that the trans boy wasn't being harassed. I was saying that there is more going on here, because a couple of boys saying "I'm not comfortable with this girl in the locker room" wouldn't get them suspended for 10 days, the school district said the same thing in the article.
I was also uncomfortable being in there. And I agree with you that the article doesn't give us enough background of what was going on, because obviously there's a lot more to the story if the school board did find that these kids were bullying.
And I agree that filming wasn't appropriate, presumably there would have been a lot of boys in there that weren't bullies.
Anyway, I think there is a lot more to this story than what is in the article. So us from the outside, it's just conjecture. The scoreboard made a decision on what they thought was going to keep kids safe. And their decision was to suspend kids they perceived as being bullies.