Transphobes have caused a school district in the States to be temporarily closed down after they threatened a 12-year-old girl with violence and abuse.
Students in the area of Achille in Oklahoma were prevented from attending their educational establishments when parents objected to the girl, who is trans, using the girls’ toilets once. She was supposed to use the staff ones but didn’t know where they were, so went to the ones the fellow girls went to. Just once.
That was enough for a group of transphobic parents to launch into a hateful tirade. The girl, called Maddie, was threatened with castration and beatings, and was referred to as “this thing” and a “half baked maggot”.
Screenshots of the abuse, as published by Queerty, show Eddie Belcher saying: “If he [sic] wants to be a female make him a female. A good sharp knife will do the job real quick”; Kevin Bickerstaff saying: “Just tell the kids to kick ass in the bathroom and it won’t want to come back!!”; Waylon Lott saying: “I let the queer teacher get me worked up. This is even worse! Lol”; Seth Shelbie Cooper saying, in response to Lott: “Both cases are BS, neither one of them should be allowed near th [sic] school”; Eddie McCrosky saying: “Parents and Churches need to shut this down, the Bible says God created man, and woman… not any transgender BS… also says any man lay with another man, he be condemned to hell… Hell with new laws and new rules, this is what our future is if WE don’t stop it”; Gina Seagroves asked: “How old is this thing”.
It went on and on and on.
Parents, who should be setting an example to their children of how to live a tolerant and respectful life, were behaving like hate-filled monsters, and instead they set an example of bullying and bigotry. What chance does Maddie have of her peers ever accepting her and treating her well when they are learning such behaviours from their parents?
We can only hope that the kids themselves are more loving and accepting than the adults in their lives.
The fact that McCrosky invoked Biblical teachings and referred to God and hell is also very telling. It is so frequently extreme right-wing Christian groups that contribute to the hateful and patriarchal beliefs of their members, especially towards LGBT+ people. There’s no mention of the Jesus who told a crowd to only throw a stone if they had never committed a sin themselves, or the Jesus who talked about loving your neighbours as yourself.
Instead, an atrocious, immoral Jesus is brought up – a Jesus who in the Bible never mentioned, for instance, homosexuality or transgenderism – and yet who is misrepresented to believers and used to control the lives of both believers and non-believers through social pressure as well as laws.
Maddie and her mum, Brandy, have had to move out of their home, while Achille schools were closed for several days while security measures were increased.
If the example you are setting your children, and the messages you send on a social media page, are such that a child and her mum have to move house and the entire school district has to shut down to improve security, you must know that you have really gone too far. The hatred of this young girl, who is different and vulnerable, is at a horrific level when she should be greeted with tolerance and understanding.
She is 12. And not prepared for this level of abuse. Who would be, at any age?
I do not even know how many more ways there are to say this. How many more LGBT+ folk will have to talk about the brutal hatred that exists towards our community. How many more schools and kids and adults will have to face up to the fact that there are members of their community who hate and despise them to the point that they are willing to behave like Belcher, Lott, Cooper and the rest have behaved? How many more articles will be written, how many more videos will be made, how many more tweets will be sent, how many more pleas for help and peace will have to be made?
It sounds like an LGBT+ teacher has already had to face up to this crowd of disgruntled abusers and for an LGBT+ child to be in the same position is unthinkable. A teacher goes into their work to help children, and children go to school to learn. The genitals or sexual preferences of people in either of those roles could not be less relevant to the reason they are attending school, and this kind of obscene pressure should not be put on anybody.
I hope that Maddie finds a school community that accepts her and that the adults quoted above, and the others who happily joined in with the jeering, see that their behaviour is reprehensible. We all have a responsibility to create communities that are welcoming and accepting, and the grown-ups who cannot cope with this duty need to grow up some more and take responsibility for their beliefs and the actions that result from them.
Photo credit: Ted Eytan/Creative Commons