Schools Protect Student Privacy, but Misinformation Thrives

In Sun Prairie Wisconsin, allegations from a conservative law firm claiming a trans girl who used a locker room with cis schoolmates behaved inappropriately has followed a familiar pattern.

by Evan Urquhart

In Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a now-familiar playbook is being run by conservatives, who are hell-bent on finding pretexts to harass trans youth in public schools. Multiple right wing outlets, including Fox News and OutKick, have covered the story of four freshman girls at Sun Prairie East High School who shared a locker room with an older trans girl. Based entirely on a letter from a conservative law firm, the stories have presented the trans girls’ behavior in a highly sexualized, highly stigmatizing way. Meanwhile, the school has said the allegations are misleading, but that they cannot respond in detail due to privacy concerns. The story recalls previous incidents in recent months, some of which were shown to be outright distortions perpetrated by anti-trans activists, others of which remain unclear.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative lawfirm, kicked off the right wing media coverage when they wrote a letter to the Sun Prairie Area School District on April 19. The letter, which WILL also distributed to the press, alleged that on March 3 four cisgender freshmen had seen a trans student from another year (who WILL believes to have been 18 at the time), undressing and showering in the girls locker room while the cis girls were rinsing off, wearing their bathing suits. The letter lays out a very convoluted path this information took to becoming public, with one of the students telling a friend, who told student services but refused to name the students involved, and eventually the mother of one of the girls becoming involved because her daughter thought the school was likely to contact her parents about the incident.

screenshot from WILL letter to Sun Prairie Area School District

WILL’s letter includes a lot of language on the supposed Title IX responsibilities of the school to have investigated what was a secondhand story in which some freshmen girls were rumored to have glimpsed a penis. The actual Title IX implications, if any, are unclear. As with other conservative complaints, WILL’s framing hinges on the idea that trans women sharing locker rooms with cis women are behaving inappropriately by virtue of being there at all, a belief that conservatives have shown extends to trans women who have had gender confirmation surgery showering at YMCAs.

The school district in question has responded by saying that WILL’s letter is “neither an accurate nor a complete account,” according to the Wisconsin State Journal.*

screenshot from the Wisconsn State Journal

The story recalls other incidents in recent months where allegations were made by conservative lawyers about some sort of impropriety regarding trans youth at public schools. In these incidents, as in this one, the school disputed the claims that had been made, but restrictions on sharing private student information prevented them from explaining further. School’s duty to protect student privacy seems to be creating an information vacuum, one which has repeatedly allowed conservative activists’ version of events to dominate the news accounts, even in the mainstream. In Maine, allegations that a social worker personally provided a transmasculine student with a binder were completely unsubstantiated, but still reported as fact by right wing news. And, in Randolph, VT, the details of a transgender girl being bullied by a cisgender teammate in the locker room eventually came to light, but only after local reporting and a public meeting where supporters of the trans girl came forward to tell the tale.

Federal law protects student privacy, and well it should. Unfortunately, however, unscrupulous right wing activists are using those protections to their advantage, to amplify rumors and bias against trans youth in public schools without any good way for the full story to come out. Mainstream reporters should be mindful of this dynamic, and seek to place unsubstantiated claims by anti-trans activists with a history of slanting the truth in proper context.

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the Wisconsin State Journal as the “Washington State Journal”.