Some of us told folks that these anti-trans policies would have unintended consequences.
From LGBTQNation:
In Arizona last week, a cisgender male 8th grader was “physically removed” from tryouts for his school’s boys’ basketball team because an error on his original birth certificate incorrectly identified him as being born female. It’s the latest episode in a “gender ideology”-inspired nightmare for the teenager, Laker Jackson, and his family.
. . . The Kafkaesque drama was inspired by a clerical mistake 14 years ago, when hospital staff mistakenly identified Becky Jackson’s newborn son as a girl. It was an error Laker’s parents never noticed. I give him the birth certificate and they’re like, ‘Did you know this says female?’” Becky Jackson recalled about handing over enrollment paperwork to a school administrator last year. “I was like, ‘What?’” Becky Jackson said. “I was like, ‘Oh man, that’s so funny.’ So we come home, everyone’s laughing.” The busy mom of six said correcting the document wasn’t a priority.
“So we just put it in the drawer and moved on,” she said. The mix-up didn’t cause issues until recently, she told AZ Family. Last spring, school staff began treating Jackson as female, Becky Jackson said. The district removed Laker Jackson from an all-boys gym class and mandated he use a separate restroom, despite the family’s assertion that their son is a cisgender boy, assigned male at birth. Becky’s mom had already started work on changing Laker Jackson’s birth certificate, but “it’s not something that you can fix quickly. You have to have an affidavit signed,” she said.
In the meantime, the 14-year-old continued training to make the boys’ basketball team at his Mesa high school, a 7th to 12th-grade school in the Queen Creek Unified School District. Becky Jackson said she received the corrected birth certificate over the summer and provided the district with the revised document, along with a doctor’s note confirming Laker’s sex.
But Queen Creek administrators said it wasn’t enough, standing by a rule stating that the school’s determination of a student’s sex would rely solely on an original birth certificate.
According to Jackson, this caused her son to be physically removed from basketball tryouts in front of his teammates. The article goes on to say:
. . .The ordeal is a prime example of what activists have long warned: that anti-trans policies are bad for everyone. It’s also quite ironic, considering the very people who want to stop anyone assigned male at birth from playing on girls’ sports teams may wind up forcing a cisgender boy to do just that.
This situation is a perfect opportunity give a little critique of my LGBTQ community.
Our problem is we aren't petty enough. I don't mean petty to each other. We tend to be that way for days on end. What I am talking about is being petty to those who oppose our basic equality. The anti-LGBTQ industry has done so many ugly things to us - smearing our names, dehumanizing our families, and trying to gaslight us to death - that we've become desensitized to their actions.
Desensitization of those constantly endangering your safety and equality can be seen as a good coping mechanism designed to protect yourself from psychological harm, but it has its drawbacks. A major one is underappreciating the times when the actions of those attempting to steal your rights away either backfire or cause harm to members of the general public.
I've been blogging for over 19 years, so I've witnessed anti-LGBTQ activists, and religious right groups make a large amount of embarrassing public mistakes due to their stridency. But generally, they are able to pick themselves up and continue as if nothing happened. This is in part due to how blase we are when it comes to capitalizing on these mishaps. Regarding the case above, what our community will most likely do is to laugh or make interesting conversation about said incident, but only in OUR circles.
But it's a major situation which directly outlines what many of us have been saying about the foolishness of anti-trans policies - that the problems they are supposed to handle are pretty much nonexistent, but the unintended consequences of enacting them can do a lot of damage.
It's a great situation for us to be petty. When bigots make mistakes or cause negative unintended consequences, we should be rubbing their faces in these mishaps publicly and often. We've desensitized ourselves so much that we've allowed the opposition to dictate the rules and arguments. When they make mistakes - and they make a lot of mistakes - we don't capitalize on these mistakes to shift the narrative. It seems that we are too busy trying to avoid the fight instead of diving in while exploiting their mistake as an advantage.
Yes, it's being petty and some folks may claim that such things are beneath us. But damn that. This isn't a gymnastic competition. We aren't being judged on points. Just overall success.
