Utah School Board Bigot Makes Clear: Coming For The Trans Kids Means They're Coming For *You*

Gender police police gender. It's what they do.

Photo by Denin Lawley on Unsplash

On Tuesday night, Natalie Cline, a concerned mother and a member of the Utah State Board of Education (USBE), took to Facebook and marked up an Instagram post promoting a girls’ basketball game, heavily implying that a girl who looked “buff” is a trans girl inappropriately and illegally playing on a girls’ intramural basketball team.

As one does.

The Salt Lake Tribune somewhat accurately described what happened next:

[Cline’s post set off] 16 hours of hateful speculation that continued even after she deleted it Wednesday afternoon.

(Note to the Trib: If the hateful speculation continued after the deletion, it wasn’t just 16 hours worth, was it?)

The Trib notes:

The comment section quickly became filled with people calling out the player, naming her, threatening her and referring to her with vulgar language. Some identified her school […]

As one does.

The school, in a somewhat surprising move for a government institution in Utah that still arrests women for being topless in their own homes, then threatens them with 10 years of sex offender registration to force a misdemeanor plea, secured police protection for the doxxed and threatened student. A student that the Trib helpfully clarified “has always been female.”

As one does.

The intensity of the threats and invective, along with the requirement of police protection for an innocent cisgender child, made the news and sparked its own wave of outrage. Utah’s governor and lieutenant governor even issued a sympathetic joint statement, which again is somewhat surprising for a state that makes it illegal for a stepmom to take off an itchy shirt when putting up drywall in her own home.

Utah’s 2KUTV interviewed the father to clarify some things:

“I am the father of this girl. And yes, she is a girl. She was born a girl. She knows she’s a girl. She’s never taken any kind of medications or had any medical procedures to be a boy. She’s naturally muscular. She goes to the gym….”

We also found out that the father wishes Cline to resign from the USBE for attacking a child instead of protecting children. Thank goodness for all this important information, though it would have been a nice bonus if 2KUTV had had enough time to ask how well the victim of these threats was holding up.

Pro-queer Equality Utah also took Cline to task for her “mocking statement … targeting a female high school student.” They further clarified, “the student, in fact, is not [transgender],” before concluding, “If [Cline] does not show the decency to resign, we call on Utah voters to protect Utah’s children and deny her a second term this November.”

As mentioned above, Cline took down her original post the next day, and replaced it with the sincerest regrets a bigot could muster:

"To protect the player, I have removed the post. My deepest apologies for the negative attention my post drew to innocent students and their families.”

As relieved as everyone was to learn that Cline is saddened by threats, vitriol, and virtually Wonkette-level cussing when those are targeted at innocent students, she added another post to make sure we did, in fact, bestow on the guilty an appropriate level of condemnation:

"We live in strange times when it is normal to pause and wonder if people are what they say they are because of the push to normalize transgenderism in our society. But that is definitely not the case with this student […]

“In a world that sometimes uses children as human shields to push radical agendas, it has become increasingly difficult to trust and to know how to protect children without hurting children when children are the targets and victims.”

There were no words of criticism for the very fine people who targeted a student with insults and credible threats, but Cline was clearly sorry that the world now includes “misunderstanding and confusion on all sides of what used to be a black and white issue.”

Bizarrely, Cline’s behavior didn’t please the author of a string of anti-trans bills including the relevant HB0011 which banned assigned male at birth trans kids from playing in girls’ school sports. State Rep. Kera Birkeland hit back that if her child was targeted this way, she’d be trying to sue, making sure to say:

“A post was made to stir up controversy over a GIRL who plays basketball. There is a process in place to make sure that high school athletics in Utah are fair and where appropriate, separated by sex. Trust the process. […] For those saying that player is a boy, PLEASE stop. She's a girl and she deserves privacy and respect.”

But if she wasn’t a girl? If she wasn’t a legit girl in Birkeland’s eyes? Who knows!

Birkeland has been conducting this anti-trans train for years now. After first attempting to pass a bill in 2020 that would ban all trans kids from participating in sports except under the gender listed on their original birth certificate, she took over 100 meetings (she says) seeking a compromise solution. The bill she drafted as that compromise created a commission to which trans children could appeal for permission to play their desired sport AND a total ban on trans kids playing in girls’ sports (but not boys’ sports). The board was only to handle permission requests if the ban was held to be unconstitutional or otherwise unenforceable, and in the case of assigned female at birth trans youth looking to play in boys’ leagues. Compromise!

The bill was vetoed by Governor Cox, but his veto was overridden. Shortly thereafter, the ACLU sued on behalf of two families with trans children in Utah schools and the ban was actually stayed while the commission was allowed to move forward.

This is the “process in place” that Birkeland asks Utahns to trust. According to the legislation, trans children or adolescents inform their prospective coach that they’d like to play a sport. If the sport is not restricted by gender, they can try out. If it is, the school informs the athletic association in charge of the sport and the athletic association informs the state board. The board then holds secret meetings with the child and parents, then determines eligibility. They then contact the athletic association if a waiver is granted, otherwise all information, including any conclusions reached by the board, is private. Despite this, it is apparently common knowledge among Cline, Birkeland, the governor, the lieutenant governor, and who knows how many other elected officials that no waivers have ever been granted. This is our surprised face.

(Parents of trans kids have gone on the record calling the board a joke and a farce, calling out in particular the lack of any established criteria that would allow children to merit an exception. Money quote: “There are no rules, and it’s really up to the whims of this commission.” So the compromise bill was a ban, with a fallback if a ban was unconstitutional of … a ban.)

While all the above is clear enough from the text of the law, the bill was notably silent on enforcement procedures in case of a known or suspected violation. (If you don’t want to read the bill or trust yr Wonkette, you could also read the badly formatted UHSAA Handbook on trans participation.)

So what did Birkeland think was going to happen? Her statement included, “even if you don't trust the process, be good enough humans to handle your concerns through the appropriate channels.” Except the law creates zero “appropriate channels.” According to Natalie Cline, the UHSAA and the actual law which Birkeland wrote, doxxing and threatening students is exactly as “channels” as going to the police, calling your state legislator, or complaining to Comcast tech support. (Who knows? It might actually be more helpful.)

This is the result that literally every cissexist jerkface wanted: a law that provides justification to hound the people that they hate, with no limits on how or when to express their hatred. It’s also exactly the law that Birkeland drafted. How did she think this was going to work?

This law was always going to be used to justify attacks on kids. Sore loser parents have been attacking competent girls who demonstrate athletic skill (much less excellence) since long before HB0011 was drafted, and the Trib reports there have been “a slew of accusations” since. It strains credibility that a member of America’s “trust the process” party didn’t know this had happened, was happening, and would continue to happen. And yet, given that Birkeland said she was motivated in part by all the NCAA records trans swimmer Lia Thomas now owns (the appropriated voice of Morgan Freeman: “We should recognize that number is zero”), she might just be stupid enough to believe that nobody would question any player’s gender.

But the beating heart of trans exclusion is gender policing. You can never have a ban on trans inclusion if no one ever checks to see if someone is trans, and you cannot create a system that depends on such checks without it also depending on gender. People make judgments about transness only by comparing a person’s appearance to stereotypes. Only if stereotypes were 100 percent accurate could we ever expect that beating heart to stop beating on people once it finished with all the trans folks.

This isn’t something we’ve suddenly discovered in 2024. It wasn’t newly revealed with Cline’s oopsie. I’ve been saying it forever with my friends, and putting the general public on notice since at least 1997’s annual Lesbian Community Project meeting. You can’t police the marginalized without policing the margins.

In traffic policing there are at least some stops that people can agree are fair regardless of a driver’s appearance or a cop’s racism — when a driver runs a red light, for example. Not so with gender policing. Utah’s accusatory gender geniuses aren’t ESPing psych and medical records. They aren’t using a tricorder to detect chromosomes or gametes. They aren’t using x-ray spex to peer through clothing. Gender policing is always and only based on stereotypes.

What does that mean? It means that as long as a community wishes to regulate trans inclusion, it will inevitably require (and must accept) that cis women and men who break stereotypes will face intrusive, personal, and harmful accusations. Many people were outraged when an Utah school district investigated a cis girl and reported back on her sex to her secret accusers, but this was literally a best case. The school district checked its records and found the child had been attending school as a girl since kindergarten. But what if the child had moved into the district as a teenager from out of state? What if that state amends birth certificates? Or what if they had documentation that showed the child was indeed trans, but had an appropriate waiver from the state board in charge of such things? (LOL that the board would grant anyone a waiver.) How would they satisfy themselves that the child was eligible? What would they tell the accuser if they were satisfied? What would they tell that parent if they weren’t?

By writing into law that that eligibility is based on matching one’s sexual anatomy at birth to a female or male archetype, it is literally impossible to say that a student is eligible to play in girls’ sports without necessarily saying by implication, “Yes, this child has a moist, healthy, functioning vagina.”

It makes you want to scream, “What is even the fuck, you pedophiles?” Except that the one thing that appears universally consistent among all the parties chiming in on this debacle is that it is relevant and important to state that this poor student is not trans. This is that beating heart of gender policing, beating this poor child. From queer-positive non-profits to government officials to TV news editors to whomever the fuck, they all want you to know that it matters that this kid is innocent of the crime of being trans.

It’s impossible to care about trans people and not rip your own heart in half to see that word “innocent” repeated over and over again. From whatever might be the least offensive application of that word in this situation right up to Cline’s not-pology “for the negative attention my post drew to innocent students,” the world wants you to know that they don’t give a fuck about trans kids.

She’s telling you right now, in so many words, that if the student she attacked had been trans, she wouldn’t be apologizing. Doxxing, threatening, insulting, harassing: These are all explicitly acceptable tactics to an elected member of the USBE, so long as the victim is trans. She’s telling us who she is, and I believe her.

And so you can see why trans people would be scared, have been scared for decades. The lowest credible estimates for out trans people’s portion of the population are just under 0.5 percent. There are 75,000 students playing organized school sports in Utah. If the situation were in any way normal, we would expect a minimum of 300 out trans youth right in there with their 75,000 cis peers. What we actually have is four. Trans kids are terrified, and for very, very good reason when even Equality Utah thinks it’s relevant whether a victim of this abuse is or isn’t trans.

And maybe you would think that means that we wouldn’t have any energy to spare for those innocent of the crime of transness, but we do. The gender policing that cissexist folks demand as a response to trans existence also hurts cis people. It hurt this girl in Utah. It’s hurt others in the same state. It’s hurt athletes all over, and for many years. We’ve been saying the gender policing leopards are eating cis faces for a long, long time.

And yet those warnings have been ignored. We see an endless stream of people arguing with a straight face that bans on trans people in sport are there to protect girls and women, but only the opposite can be true. Accusations will fly, and because of the universal assumption that all these terrible tactics are valid so long as the target is trans, anyone who trusts their stereotypes will feel justified to insult, to harass, and to threaten. And the schools, the law having defined them into a corner, have no choice but to openly share the most personal details of a child’s medical and psychological history with anyone who wants to make an accusation.

As. One. Does.

This was always how this law was going to work. It’s always how all such laws are going to work. It’s how bathroom segregation laws work. It is the way cis people desiring to avoid trans people work: They will stereotype; they will accuse; they will judge. And the law tells them they are right to do so.

And this is what, ironically, has always given me hope. If it were possible to construct a law that only harms trans kids, the electorates of many states would tolerate them indefinitely. But it’s not possible. So I can openly and honestly say to cis readers: This is not in your best interest. You will always be at risk, you will never be safe, and the only consolation will be that after you are harmed, the cissexists who harass or threaten or even attack you will at least be genuinely sorry, because everyone believes the cis girl doesn’t deserve it. Birkeland and her Republican colleagues can express all the surprise they like, but this has always been true.

Feminism is always intersectional or bullshit, in this case it’s just easier to see. The position that protects trans people, an end to gender policing, is also the only position that protects the freedom of cis people to speak as they like, dress as they like, live as they like. The feminist vision of a world where women are free to simply be who they are is utterly dependent on smothering the heart of gender policing, of women, of men, of anyone, until the damn thing stops beating.

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