Are these stories true?

AB1266, The School Success and Opportunity Act, requires that any pupil “be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.” The bill was signed into law Aug. 12, 2013 by Gov. Brown, and became effective Jan. 1 of this year.

The bill has organized opposition called the Privacy for All Students (PFAS) coalition. This coalition engaged in a signature gathering effort to put AB1266 up for a referendum in the November 2014 election. According to California Election Code, to qualify the potential referendum for ballot they must have submitted 504,760 valid voter signatures. The first step in the process is to spot check the 619,233 submitted signatures to determine if there’s a chance that the referendum qualifies. Again according to California Election Code, if a spot check of 5 percent of the total votes statistically indicates that between 95 percent to 110 percent of the required valid voter signatures have been submitted to qualify the bill for ballot (in this case, between 479,522 and 555,236 signatures), then individual verification of all 619,233 signatures must be undertaken. That is in process now; if they have enough valid voter signatures to force a referendum the law is suspended at least until a vote in November of this year.

The spot check will have been completed by the time this column is published – the due date for the spot check’s completion is Jan. 8.

Back in late October of last year, our San Diego ABC affiliate’s Michael Chen reported on the referendum signature gathering effort. In that Oct. 27 article, Chen reported that Dran Reese, head of the Salt & Light Council and the signature collection effort, stated that she believes the welfare of California’s children is on the line. Reese told the story of an alleged case of a trans girl engaging in unlawful behavior.

“Reese pointed out a recent case in which a Los Angeles-area high school student complained to her school that a transgender boy harassed her and peeked at girls over the stalls,” Chen wrote in the article. But in an update to the story, Chen wrote “the Los Angeles Unified School District said in a statement, ‘They determined that the allegations were unfounded.’”

Another story of a trans female student allegedly behaving badly in her public school involved a paid signature gatherer stating that in Oakland, Calif. there was a trans student who had raped other girls in a school locker room. Troy Flint, a spokesperson for the Oakland Unified School District stated, “Contrary to the allegations … we have not received reports of sexual assault or sexual harassment perpetrated by transgender students.”

Across the nation we’ve seen other unfounded stories reported. In 2008 the Citizens For Responsible Government dressed a man associated with the organization in women’s clothing and in a media stunt had him walk through a Montgomery County, Md. gym locker room. In 2012 it was claimed that a trans woman exposed herself in Evergreen State College in Everett, Wash. to two high school students. It turned out that the trans woman in question was inside talking in the gym’s sauna with a cisgender when two high school students intentionally wandered into the off limits to them sauna area. The students couldn’t see inside the sauna unless they specifically made an effort to look, and in the words of Cristan Williams of The Transadvocate, “At no point did the trans woman act to expose herself to children. At no point was the trans woman walking around nude in the area where children were.”

We can add to the possible unfounded stories with one of a trans woman exposing herself to an elderly woman in a Toronto Y’s locker room. The veracity of the story wasn’t checked at all by the Toronto Star’s Ken Gallinger, their Ethically Speaking columnist. After I identified myself as a journalist for LGBT Weekly and asked him if he fact-checked the story put forward as a question in his column entitled Transgender woman’s behaviour in changeroom unacceptable, he replied “It was a reader’s claim – no more and no less. I’ve had to learn to accept the fact that sometimes the questions people put contain various degrees of factuality; people present situations as they see them, and that’s not quite the same, sometimes, as the hard facts of a matter.” So, we don’t know if the story is true or not – Gallinger didn’t verify the story he published.

We’ve a referendum possibly coming in California in November of 2014 regarding transgender youth. We have lots of examples of stories, by folk who are against public accommodation protections for trans people, of bad behavior in bathrooms and locker rooms. If and when we hear some of these stories told by people associated with the Privacy for All Students, the question we need to ask, and ask the public to ask is, “Are these stories true?”