Trans Entitlement & Sex-Based Violence in Our Schools

How School Gender Ideology Policies Lay the Groundwork for Sex-Based Violence Against Girls

Recently footage of a violent attack at Hazlebrook Middle School in the Tigard-Tualatin School District in Oregon went viral. The attack features a boy grabbing a girl from behind, pulling her to the ground, rolling her around by her hair, hitting her multiple times on the head and arms, and finally releasing her with the warning, “talk shit again bitch.” (This was not his first time assaulting a girl.)

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The video is alarming for a number of reasons: due to its violent nature, the fact that it is a boy attacking a girl, and the fact that the boy attacks her unprovoked from behind. But this is not exactly why the video has gone viral. A large reason that this video has received over 10 million social media views and massive national media attention is because this particular boy calls himself a “transgender girl.”

This boy in Oregon is not the only boy who calls himself a trans girl who has assaulted girls at school:

• In Louden County, VA two separate girls were raped and assaulted by a boy calling himself gender fluid.

• In Oklahoma, a boy claiming to be trans assaulted two girls in the bathroom.

• In Texas a boy calling himself a transgender girl, put a girl in the hospital due to his assault.

• In Riverside, CA a boy who identifies as transgender assaulted a girl after spitting on her and exposing himself in the girl’s locker room.

• In Brazil a boy who identifies as trans assaulted two girls because they were advocating for single-sex bathrooms.

Why do these incidents keep happening? Policymakers such as the Superintendent of Tigard-Tualatin School District, Sue Reiki-Smith, would like us to believe that the claimed gender identities of the boy in question is unrelated to the assault on a girl.

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She, and other school officials, see no relationship between policies that allow boys to disregard the bodily integrity of girls in their intimate spaces and sports and increasing incidents of male violence against girls.

The Underlying Lessons of Gender Identity Ideology Policies

Under the banner of “gender identity” kids who claim trans identities are told that they are entitled to constant affirmation, validation, and inclusion for their opposite-sex identities. They are told that any failure by others to affirm, validate, and include them based on their claimed identity is equal to hate. But let’s be clear, the values of affirmation, validation, and inclusion are not universally good or moral values. They are only good and moral in certain situations.

Affirmation and validation are good things to offer when it comes to someone’s emotions. Someone tells you they are hurt or angry, and you can say “I acknowledge that you are hurt/angry.” But this scenario does not ask the validator to deny or abandon their own sense perceptions of reality. But when affirming and validating means going against the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears, then it becomes harmful. Sex recognition is a primal animal instinct that is engrained in all animals. Infants as young as 9 days old can distinguish between the sexes. Having a high-functioning safeguarding impulse relies on being able to trust one’s instincts. Any practice of behavior that is counter-instinctual creates dissociation and dissonance and dulls the instinctive response system. Our responsibility to ourselves is to stay grounded in reality, the primacy of our senses, and to trust our body’s signals. Teaching kids to deny these signals is a safeguarding failure.

Inclusion also sounds like a wonderful value, and it is if you’re talking about inviting all the kids in your 3rd-grade class to your birthday. But when it comes to safeguarding boundaries are needed. And boundaries are necessarily exclusive. When boys are taught they are entitled to violate girls’ boundaries when it comes to their privacy in intimate spaces, it teaches them to practice predatory and abusive behavior. And when girls are taught by teachers and school boards that their boundaries around their bodies don’t matter, it teaches them that there is no one to turn to to help them uphold their boundaries. It teaches them to dissociate and deny their own discomfort in order to emotionally support boys. This is the opposite of healthy bodily autonomy, authority, and boundaries. This creates a vulnerability to future predation. This teaches them to accept abuse and become the caretaker of their abuser.

The way these values are taught under the banner of gender identity ideology, affirmation, validation, and inclusion amount to forced positivity. Forced positivity is a manipulation tactic that gives the illusion of a moral good that is beyond question. It implies an unspoken allusion that the person who does not comply with these things is morally bad. It is an attempt to coerce the person who is taught the doctrine to disregard their own intuition and instincts. The doctrine teaches that if they want to be a good person, they must comply rather than speak up on their own behalf.

External Expression & Perceptual Control

Gender ideology teaches the denial of sex and the denial of the body. Gender ideology reduces men and women’s fully embodied humanity into an abstract identity based in sexist stereotypes. Kids are taught that any rejection of their own body means they might just be the opposite sex. But this is not based in any understanding of the lived reality or material conditions of the opposite sex, but simply whatever preconceived notions they have gleaned from cultural symbols and their own imaginations. When boys are told that all they need do to become a girl is simply declare words and change clothes, this reduces girls to nothing but a concept and style of dressing rather than human beings with unique physical needs that require tending. To reduce girls to whatever it is that boys think about girls is to begin to dehumanize the girls. To deprive girls of any material analysis of their physical conditions by conceptualizing them into a mere idea of an identity is both disempowering and objectifying for girls. It teaches boys to objectify and commodify girls as things they can purchase: clothes, makeup, hormones, and plastic surgery. Girls cease to be human beings for these boys because girls are simply a collection of parts that can be purchased, put on, and owned.

Further, boys are told that through their identity declarations and physical expressions they can (and should be able to) control other people’s perceptions of them. The ideology teaches that everyone around you must affirm and validate. If someone accurately identifies your sex, you are told to correct them and tell them how they should refer to you even when you are not there. The ideology itself is one of constant external validation seeking and perceptual control. But the fact is, no one can control how others perceive them. Anyone who is constantly trying to control other people’s perceptions of them will soon be in a state of psychological anxiety, insecurity, and emotional instability. This is a setup for being incredibly reactive to perceived slights. This is the opposite of mental wellness. Having a healthy psychological equilibrium would be to release any perceptual control of others and stop seeking external validation and rather find a sense of internal authority and integrity of self that does not rely on anything so superficial as identity labels or clothes.

Boys Beating Girls in Sports

Boys in girls sports is too broad a topic to cover in entirety here, but a few key observations can be made as it pertains to male entitlement. Gender ideology teaches boys that girls’ sports is not for the physical needs of girls, but for the emotional validation needs of boys. When sports are segregated by sex, it makes it clear that sports are about the physical capabilities and capacities of bodies. Sex segregation in sports honors the uniqueness of boys’ vs girls’ bodies. When sports are segregated by identities, this teaches that sports are about the validation of an abstract sense that one has about oneself. It is a dismissal of the importance of bodies, a dismissal of the importance of safety, and a dismissal of the importance of fairness. Wherever boys are participating in girls’ sports, boys are beating girls. Many sports are contact sports, so often boys are literally beating girls. This reinforces the erroneous notion that boys and girls are on an equal playing field. If boys can hit girls on the field, why not in the hallways?

Hyperbole and Gaslighting

While we don't know what motivated the Oregon boy to attack this girl, we do know that schools in Oregon, like many other states in the US, are aggressively push gender identity ideology to their students, giving boys the right to violate girls' bathrooms, locker rooms, & sports. Teachers, school board members, and curriculum use all kinds of hyperbole to enflame already reactive students. An example of the kind of inflammatory statements that students hear can be seen in the recent Seattle Public School board meeting. When some parents expressed safeguarding concerns about parental consent in curriculum, warned about the potential harms of kids being socially transitioned at school, and expressed concerns about hormone side effects, the response was hyperbolic panic. In response to these calm and reasonable speakers, teachers, school board members, and even the school board superintendent waded into high hyperbole saying things like these parents "wanted their kids not to exist,” that they “hate” their kids, and the superintendent even said that these parents were the same as the ones that protested Ruby Bridges during desegregation. This kind of gross exaggeration and over dramatization when modeled by adults, is taken literally by students who are already insecure in their identities. Concerned parents do not hate kids, want them to cease existing, or want to keep them from an education, in fact, they want to keep them safe from indoctrination that dissociates them from their primary instincts.

I reflect that school policies and curriculum that teach boys that they are entitled to cross girls' boundaries in their intimate spaces and sports, is already the encouragement of violence. It follows that more violence against girls would be a logical outcome of such policies. Gender identity ideology is rooted in the dehumanization and boundary violation of women/girls.