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randi’s ilk…

The Facebook post was not out of the norm for the member of the Utah State Board of Education, a woman known for her hard-right views: It showed a high school girls’ basketball team in the Salt Lake City area and falsely suggested one player was transgender.

But it ignited a firestorm.

While the post triggered a torrent of derogatory threats that prompted the student’s school district to provide her with security, it also prompted condemnation from across the spectrum in this deeply conservative state. The legislature censured board member Natalie Cline and blasted her for a “repugnant attack.” The governor called her action an “unconscionable” case of harassment. Others condemned her for bullying a child.

All of this month’s outrage has been cold comfort to transgender Utahns and their advocates, however. They view Cline’s post as the alarming yet predictable outcome of anti-trans state policies that they believe encourage vigilantism — including a law to bar transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. The latest controversy, they say, has only buttressed the idea that being identified as transgender is a slur.

“If it really was a trans person, would we have gotten the same reaction?” asked Sue Robbins, a transgender activist in Salt Lake City. “Or would we have had an outcry against that trans person?”

Transgender rights advocates see a witch-hunt type atmosphere spreading as states enact a flurry of laws seeking to restrain trans people. Utah last year prohibited gender-affirming care for minors and in January passed a law requiring people to use bathrooms and locker rooms in public schools and government buildings that align with the sex they were assigned at birth.

More than 20 states have passed bans on transgender girls’ participation on sports teams, with Ohio the latest after lawmakers in January overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. In Florida, which in 2021 passed one of the nation’s first “fairness in women’s sports” laws, state athletics officials last year fined a Broward County high school for allowing a trans athlete to compete in girls’ volleyball, outing the student in the process.

Proponents of such laws counter that public accusations, true or false, are the result of transgender activism itself.

“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,” Cline wrote Feb. 7 as part of an apology on her Facebook page after she removed the offensive post. She did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

It was not the first time such questions about student athletes’ gender have become public in Utah. In January, the Canyons School District barred a “belligerent” parent from attending basketball games at one high school after he twice approached principals at a junior varsity game to question whether a girl on the opposing team was transgender, district spokesman Jeff Haney said.

And in 2022, after the sports ban passed, a representative of the Utah High School Activities Association told lawmakers it had received complaints when a student “doesn’t look feminine enough” and investigated an athlete who won first place at a state competition. Without notifying the parents or student, spokesman David Spatafore said, the association and schools scoured the athlete’s records back to kindergarten and determined “she’d always been a female.”

That ban was initially vetoed by Gov. Spencer Cox (R), who described it as overly punitive for the four trans students who were then among the 75,000 high school athletes in Utah. “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few,” Cox wrote. He later expressed concern about parents questioning athletes’ genders. “We’ve become sore losers,” he said, “looking for any reason our kid lost.”…

(WashPo)

“We’ve become sore losers,” he said, “looking for any reason our kid lost.”

You could change the word "kids" to "team" and apply nearly universally across politics, sports, pretty much anything. We are a country full of whiners who don't take accountability for failures and choose to blame pretty much anyone else if the results aren't what was hoped for.