UT: Teen Harassed, Accused of Being Trans at JV HS Basketball Game
A high school girl’s right to play junior varsity basketball was challenged by a furious parent who falsely believed she was transgender.
by Evan Urquhart
Cisgender girls are being falsely accused of being transgender by irate transphobic parents, an outcome that opponents of bans on transgender participation in athletics predicted was inevitable. In Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported the details of one recent confrontation where an irate parent demanded that a cisgender girl playing junior varsity basketball be disqualified, insisting that she was a boy. The Tribune story referenced a known earlier instance of similar false accusations levied against an athlete, and explained that more such confrontations are known to have occurred, though sports authorities in Utah have not released any information about their frequency.
This incident involved a junior varsity girls basketball game in Canyons School District, located in the southeast portion of Salt Lake County, Utah. The angry father of one of the players confronted the principals for both his daughter’s school and the opposing team, insisting that one of the other players be removed from the team because he thought she was transgender. The girl was not transgender, but the man refused to take that for an answer.
screenshot from the Salt Lake Tribune
When possible, officials have previously said they try to keep challenges based on a girl’s appearance not being deemed sufficiently feminine a secret, to limit the damage to the athletes. In cases like this one, however, where parents make a scene and publicly accuse a teenage girl of secretly being trans, there’s no limiting the damage.
Witch hunts where cisgender girls are humiliated and accused of being trans were correctly predicted as an inevitably result of a moral panic over trans youth that has elevated the blood pressure of conservatives across the country and currently has them jumping at transgender shadows. In Utah, when a ban on transgender athletes was put into effect, there was only one transgender girl playing school sports in the entire state who was impacted, again according to reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune. Purely by the odds alone, the ban is likely to negatively impact the lives of many more cisgender athletes than transgender ones. The rationale for these bans that they would help protect cis girls in sports has proven, just as opponents predicted it would, to be a thin one.
CORRECTION: The earliest version of this story misnamed the Salt Lake Tribune as the St. Louis Tribune. Whoops!