Two Years of Lies About Loudoun
The false story of a sexual assault by a trans girl in a bathroom in a Loudoun, VA school was one of the early drivers of the anti-trans panic that has gripped the right. What can we learn now the New York Times has belatedly set the record straight.
by Evan Urquhart
According to an extensively reported story in the New York Times, on May 28, 2022, a fourteen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl in Loudoun, VA made plans via text to ditch their respective classes and meet up in a girls’ bathroom stall, a spot where they had previously met and had sex. The boy wanted sex again, and when the girl refused he raped her on the floor of the stall.
When the girl’s distraught father found out he rushed to the school, becoming aggressive when he was not allowed entry due to having forgotten a drivers’ license (as required to check in). The father subsequently worked with right-wing media including the Daily Wire and Tucker Carlson to put forward the false story that his daughter had been raped by a “gender fluid” trans student who was allowed in the bathroom due to trans-inclusive policies at the school.
screenshot from the New York Times
The story succeeded in whipping up outrage among an outrage-hungry Republican base and helped elect Republican Glenn Youngkin to the governorship of Virginia. It also formed the template for a type of anti-trans disinformation story that relies on school officials’ inability to share private information about their students (aided with the hollowing-out of legitimate local journalism) to turn self-serving, dishonest, one-sided accounts from anti-trans students and parents into the dominant—sometimes only—narrative that gets told. It’s happened in Maine, with an unverified story from a parent who claims her transgender son received a binder at school. It was attempted in Vermont, where local media was able to correct the record around a transgender girl who was bullied in the locker room by a cisgender member of her volleyball team who went to the press with false claims. It’s similar to the situation with a sorority in Wyoming, where no one spoke up in defense of a transgender member while the cis girls attempting to get her kicked out made the rounds on right-wing news, telling their side of the story over and over again. In the absence of reporting and counter-narratives, the lies of the right dominate stories that involve (or are claimed to involve) transgender people over and over again.
In Loudoun, the facts of what happened are no longer under dispute. The cisgender boy has been tried and found guilty of the initial assault, and of a second assault on another girl. The boy, who has occasionally worn skirts, has never identified as gender fluid or transgender, nor has he ever been allowed to use girls’ bathrooms under any policy. School officials likely failed to adequately protect the second girl, who the boy pulled into a classroom and assaulted at the next school he attended. However, this hardly seems to matter. The narrative that transgender acceptance had directly led to the rape of a high school student was set in the months immediately following the assault, and no amount of reporting will change that now.
Nor, perhaps, does the New York Times want it to. In a few places the story eases up on the straight news reporting to seemingly make excuses for the misleading narratives pushed by the right and editorialize on the changing times, tacitly endorsing the notion that ideas about transgender acceptance are moving too fast.
screenshot from the New York Times
The Times describes, in detail, how an inflammatory, false story was used to rile-up the Republican base for political purposes. It even includes the information that most of the voters who were activated by this issue were elderly, beyond childbearing age. But it is strangely muted in its descriptions of the lies and the liars who perpetrated them on the public, suggesting that the changing policies were the problem even while explaining in detail that opposition to those policies had been whipped up based on lies.
There were no transgender people directly involved in what happened in Loudoun, VA, but in a sense every transgender American was involved. Trans people were the otherized figure the right seized on, a monster under conservatives’ bed to whip up their base. Trans people were the scapegoat to slip into Republican speeches, the driver to get the base to the polls. Now, trans people are the victims, subject to an ongoing and escalating campaign that encompasses stochastic terrorism, political persecution, and everything in between. The New York Times doesn’t tell the story that way, but it’s there if you know what to look for in the gaps and excuses it makes for an out-of-control far right and their enablers in the mainstream press.
