"[Y]yes, she is a girl. She was born a girl. She knows she’s a girl." And dumbasses gonna dumbass.

Adults responsible for protecting children shouldn't be accusing children of being transgender

Gender police police gender

What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind. How true that is.

• Dan Quayle

Call me silly, but if you’re a school board member anywhere, shouldn’t Job One be protecting children in your school system? I don’t know about you, but this seems like a pretty basic no-brainer to me.

Except perhaps for Natalie Cline, a member of the Utah State Board of Education (USBE), who misread her job description to include “gender police.” In her case, protecting children falls pretty far down the priority scale because…well, because gender police police gender. Duh, it’s what they do, and they can be pretty nasty about it.

And Ms. Cline seems like a real piece of work. As a mother herself, one might think that protecting children might come naturally. Then again, she convinced herself that’s precisely what she was doing.

As one does.

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.

Yes, we LOVES our young ‘uns, don’t we???

This story is particularly aggravating because the girl in question IS a girl, has always BEEN a girl, and doesn’t deserve the abuse being dumped on her merely because she’s a bit larger than your average girl.

I don’t think I’m out of line to say that someone should take Ms. Cline out behind the woodshed and kick her sorry ignorant ass. For someone charged with protecting children, she took her ignorant self-righteousness far more seriously than her responsibility to protect the poor innocent girl whose only “crime” was being on the larger side.

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….”

Since when has being bigger than average and going to the gym been a crime? And what right did Ms. Cline have to accuse the girl of being transgender? She had no evidence to support her claim, and she should have been the adult in the situation and realized what such an accusation could have led to.

Instead, she let her ignorance and prejudice lead the way, thus causing the unidentified girl to endure a tremendous amount of unnecessary harassment.

This irresponsible behavior shouldn’t go unpunished.

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 she 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.”

Cline, as mentioned above, 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.”

Yes, “the sincerest regrets a bigot could muster[.]’” And I suspect Ms. Cline assumes that should wrap it up; let’s move on to the next question, right? She expects to walk away and be done with it; no harm, no foul.

Except that shouldn’t be allowed to be the end of it for Ms. Cline. She should be allowed to issue a bigot’s apology and skate away. She brought an unimaginable degree of harassment into a teenage girl’s life; this isn’t a “too bad, so sad, I’m sorry, let’s call it good” scenario. There was a good deal of harm done here, and Ms. Cline has much to answer for.

First of all, I’d be demanding her resignation yesterday. Ms. Cline has no business being responsible for children, perhaps even including her own. Her bigotry makes her incapable of compassionately considering the interests of Utah’s schoolchildren.

Second, I’d sue Ms.Cline for everything down to her magic underwear. Given her thoughtlessness and bigotry, the unnamed girl and her family are due some compensation. No, money isn’t going to make the pain and anguish disappear magically, but it’s something that will hit Ms. Cline where it will hurt. And perhaps it will make her think twice if she’s tempted to re-offend and be a transphobic dumbass in the future.

As relieved as everyone was to learn that Cline is saddened by threats, vitriol, and…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.”

“[W]hen it is normal to pause and wonder if people are what they say they are because of the push to normalize transgenderism….” In terms of a non-apology, this apologia ranks right up there. Because, as a wise friend used to tell me with distressing frequency:

“Dumbasses gonna dumbass, and ain’t nuthin’ you do gonna change that, knowhutimean? That’s just who they were born to be.”

I’d submit that the only people who “pause and wonder if people are what they say they are” are Right-wing busybodies WAY too concerned with how others live their lives. Perhaps if people like Ms. Cline spent more time getting and keeping their own house in order, they’d spend less time acting as the self-appointed gender police.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, there’s no such thing as “transgenderism.” Describing it as such raised it to the level of ideology, which it isn’t. Being transgender is a gender identity, which is nowhere near being an ideology. Calling it “transgenderism” puts it on the same footing as communism, socialism, and Marxism, which means it can propagandized and twisted into something to be feared and oppressed.

Natalie Cline, with no credible evidence to support her suspicions, targeted a student for allegedly being transgender, thus subjecting her to being doxxed and harassed. She has yet to truly apologize for her unwarranted and insensitive actions, almost as if she’s trying to escape blame.

Imagine if she were a Democrat; the torches and pitchforks brigades may well have already burned her home to the ground. But she’s a Conservative Republican, so why not give her a free pass, eh?

‘Cuz dumbasses gonna dumbass. It’s what they do.

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