WHISPERS AND LIES

Transgender Student Accused Of Harassing Girls In The Restroom At Colorado School

Right-wing commentators, including Fox News, are reporting that parents and students from a Colorado high school are accusing a transgender student of using the women’s restroom and harassing female students.

Last week, Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), a California-based law firm dedicated to fighting cases involving religious freedom, wrote a letter to Florence High School on behalf of an undisclosed number of female students and their families who have alleged harassment.

“This is a nightmare scenario for the teenage girls—some of them freshmen—and their parents at this school,” PJI attorney Matthew McReynolds said in a statement. “This is exactly the kind of horror story we have been warning would accompany the push for radical transgender rights in schools, and it is the type of situation that LGBT activists have been insisting would not happen.”

“We’re not going to stand by and let 99.7% of our students lose their privacy and free speech rights just because .3% of the population are gender-confused,” Brad Dacus, the president of Pacific Justice Institute, added.

Dacus went on to say that LGBT activists were “sacrificing the safety and sanity of our schools” by pushing their  “extreme political agenda.” He also warned that the problem is “spreading to every part of the nation,” calling it a “crippling blow to our constitutional freedoms.”

LGBT activists argue that the only basis for the accusations has been the original press release by PJI. Many media outlets are also crying foul. And school superintendent Rhonda Vendetti said that there have been no claims of harassment to school officials.

“Nothing has actually been verified,” she told the Transadvocate in a phone interview. “This is one parent basically bringing their viewpoint about this situation to the media because they weren’t getting the responses that they hoped they would get from the district, from parents of students at the high school, or from the board and myself.”

Vendetti added: “To our knowledge and based on our investigation, none of those things have actually happened. We do have a transgender student at the high school and she has been using the women’s restroom. There has not been a situation.”

But McReynolds refuses to believe Vendetti’s version of events, telling National Review on Wednesday: “The core issue is that this school is giving this transgender youth full access to both boys’ and girls’ facilities, and they are showing little if any regard for the privacy rights of other students.”

He added that PJI has received “additional reports of specific, inappropriate statements made by this student.” Specific details on these reports, however, are not available. Probably because they don’t exist.

Conservative activists have long promoted the myth that equal treatment for LGBT students will increase rates of sexual abuse in schools. Creating a completely fabricated example of harassment as proof that their transphobic convictions is just par for the course.

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