Florida Crusade Against Trans Kids Devastates Family
Broward County Board of Education members appointed by Ron DeSantis to further his unhinged culture war against trans people has led to a woman losing her job at a high school and her trans daughter’s life being ruined.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
In July of this year, Broward County schools employee Jessica Norton was nearly terminated from her position with the county because her daughter is transgender. A new article in the Washington Post by reporter Casey Parks details the devastating effects anti-trans witch hunt has had on one Florida family.
Norton was accused of violating Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, a bill that fails to keep women’s sports “fair,” but succeeds at its true goal: Keeping trans girls from playing sports with their peers. Norton’s violation of this act was, of course, allowing her transgender daughter Elizabeth to play volleyball at Monarch High School; because Elizabeth never underwent natal puberty as a result of being prescribed puberty blockers, and because her gender marker in both the school system and on her birth certificate had been amended to correctly reflect that she is a girl, she identified her daughter’s sex as “female” when Elizabeth tried out for the volleyball team.
Importantly, Norton had every reason to believe that her daughter would be safe transitioning and living her life normally as a girl at Monarch High School. In 2011, the Broward County School Board added “gender identity and expression” to their non-discrimination policy, a move that earned them a commendation from Equality Florida. That same school board, in 2021, pledged to oppose DeSantis’ crusade against trans youth.
Speaking more broadly, there’s plenty of evidence that trans people who don’t experience natal puberty have absolutely no advantages when it comes to athletic competitions against their cisgender peers. And despite the seemingly unending deluge of proposed and passed laws that target young trans athletes, most lawmakers couldn’t actually name a trans student participating in school sports if their lives depended on it.
Yet an anonymous tip filed in November that outed Elizabeth cost her mother her work, and cost Elizabeth any sense of privacy or normalcy in her life. Police investigators wrote a more than 500 page report about Norton and her daughter, in which they frequently misgendered Elizabeth or outright referred to her as “it.” Elizabeth’s peers were asked if they had ever seen her undress (no, they said, because nobody on the team used the locker rooms), and in one case an officer told Elizabeth’s middle school guidance counselor, who expressed concerns about discussing Elizabeth’s transition, “I am the law.”
It’s unclear what threat Elizabeth, who failed to make the volleyball team the first year she tried out, could possibly have posed to other athletes. Besides being slight of figure and having spent most of her time on the team bench warming, Elizabeth has been described as “the sweetest human being you’ll ever meet” by her teammates, who said that she “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” She was described by her team captain, Jordan Campbell, as “one of the favorites on the team that everyone loved,” who believed that during the outing and investigation she wasn’t being “treated like a human being.”
Four Monarch High School staff members, including Jessica Norton, were removed from Monarch and reassigned to other jobs in the district as part of this witch hunt. Elizabeth was outed against her will and forced to transition to a virtual school, where her mother says she can’t focus on her schoolwork and is, unsurprisingly, deeply depressed. For a girl who was voted class president her Freshman and Sophomore years, who was loved by her volleyball teammates, who was a homecoming princess, to have her school experience ruined and the memories of her teenage years forever tainted by adults with an ax to grind is unforgivable.
Jessica Norton and her husband have spent their entire lives in Broward County, and never anticipated moving away. Now, like many Floridians, like many families with trans kids all across America, they’re staring down the barrel of a tough decision: Stay where they are and endure targeted harassment from the state, or leave friends and family behind to seek a fresh start somewhere more tolerant.
We can only hope that this sickening culture war can be put to bed someday, because nobody should be forced to uproot their entire lives just for living happily and authentically, without harming anybody else.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
