Anti-trans tall tales
By 
Charles Homans has a terrific story about the widely publicized claim that school officials in Loudon County, VA had covered up a claim of sexual assault against a trans student to protect its policies protecting equal access for trans student.
School officials did fail to protect two girls from rape or sexual assault, the second being especially egregious as the boy later convicted of rape was moved to another school. The problem for the Glenn Youngkin/Tucker Carlson narrative was that the boy who committed the assaults was not trans and would not have had legal access to a girl’s bathroom under the equal access policy:
The bathroom incident at Stone Bridge High School happened at the precise moment that Policy 8040 became a statewide political story. Ziegler told me that when the administrators assembled for their virtual meeting on the afternoon of the assault, or in another conversation that day, he asked Tim Flynn, the Stone Bridge principal, whether the assailant was transgender.
“Look, the kid is not transgender,” Ziegler recalled Flynn saying. “He runs with the drama crowd, and you know how the drama crowd can be. They’re attention-seeking. And he’s been experimenting with different looks.” He wore skirts on occasion, “but he has never come out to the school as either nonbinary or transgender.” (Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.)
The boy’s mother described her son similarly. “He had presented to me this desire to explore a different lifestyle,” she said, which involved sometimes wearing women’s clothes. But he was “absolutely not” transgender, she said, and “he did not identify as fluid or anything like that.” If the boy had never to anyone’s knowledge identified as anything other than a boy, Ziegler reasoned, then he would not have been allowed in the girls’ bathroom under Policy 8040 any more than he would have been under the existing rules.
[…]
But on this score, Smith’s account had changed. At first, in the Daily Wire story, he told Rosiak: “The person that attacked our daughter is apparently bisexual and occasionally wears dresses because he likes them.” He went on: “So this kid is technically not what the school board was fighting about.” Within days, though, he said in a statement to the news media through his attorney: “The facts are that a male student claiming to be ‘gender fluid’ was permitted to enter the girls’ bathroom on May 28 and sexually assault our daughter.”
Not technically!
I really strongly recommend the article, which does a great job of giving the political and cultural context for this particular iteration of anti-trans telephone.