Bomb Threats Follow Conservative Outrage Over Middle School Fight Video

A video depicting one student assaulting another in the hallway of Hazelbrook Middle School in Tualatin, OR went viral among anti-trans conservative influencers due to speculation, presented as fact, that the assailant was a trans girl.

by Evan Urquhart

In Tualatin, Oregon, a middle school that has been struggling with violent incidents among the students, exacerbated by students recording the events on their phones and disseminating them online, became a new focal point for anti-trans hysteria on the right. A video that has been interpreted by conservatives as showing a trans girl attacking a cisgender girl went viral in the anti-trans right on Thursday, September 28. The right-wing tabloid press gleefully joined in fanning the flames, using language like “hulking bully” to describe the assailant, a middle schooler who is currently facing juvenile charges and has not been identified or confirmed to be trans. As a result of the right’s bloodthirsty rhetoric the Hazelbrook Middle School had to be evacuated last Friday due to bomb threats.

In the disturbing video, a child of middle school age comes up behind their intended victim in the hallway, grabs them by their backpack, and throws them to the ground. The assailant then yanks their hair, hits them several times in quick succession, yells “Don’t do it again, bitch” and walks off. The other child can be heard yelling “ow” and “I didn’t do anything.” The gender identities of both children are unclear. The assumed identities of a transgender girl assailant and cisgender girl victim are plausible but by no means clear (either child could reasonably have had either AGAB, and either child could have literally any gender identity).

A key source of the video’s virality, as identified by many mainstream and right-wing sources, seems to have been former fifth-place NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines. Gaines shared it last Thursday, writing “Trans male attacks female student in Oregon high school. This was certainly planned given multiple people were filming. All involved should be suspended and he should be charged with assault as a male. Identify as you wish, but you can't hide from your innate sex characteristics.”

screenshot from Twitter.com

In a follow up tweet a few hours later, Gaines clarified that the video showed a middle school, not a high school. She again chose not to mention that the assailant had not been confirmed to have been a transgender girl. The next day the middle school was evacuated after multiple bomb and shooting threats, according to reporting in the Portland Tribune and other outlets.

screenshot from the Portland Tribune

The pattern of a local story with a real or imagined trans angle going viral on the right and then being followed by threats of violence is by now incredibly well-established. Influencer activists like Gaines and others have long played a key role in amplifying these stories to an audience that reliably responds with threats and violent acts. This process, known as stochastic terrorism, is further enabled by conservative media outlets such as the New York Post, which consistently reward instigators like Gaines with attention and flattering descriptions of their anti-trans activism, amplify their message of anti-trans hatred, and downplay or deny the connection between their actions and the violent responses of their fans.

screenshot from the New York Post

While these activists repeatedly claim that they are motivated by a concern for children’s safety, it’s important to take a step back and consider the impact on children they’re having in actual fact. In addition to the children shown in the video, who did not give consent to become the subjects of a viral online story, every child in this middle school has been negatively impacted by both the viral attention and the threats of violence targeting them and their school. Gaines and others on the right seemed to imply that the consequences for the assault would be different if the assailant was treated by authorities as either a male or a female, but school policies against assault as well as criminal charges in both the juvenile and adult court system typically are not written to give different results based on the assailant’s identity.

In other words, there’s no indication that the attention on this case has led to a different outcome or even that the outcome activists like Gaines seemed to be calling for made any sense. In that context calling for the assailant “to be charged with assault as a male” isn’t really an activist demand in the traditional sense: Gaines is not using her platform to advocate for an outcome she believes would be more just, much less one that would not occur without her advocacy and spotlight, she’s just pretending she is doing that. Calling for the assailant to be charged “as a male” gives a tissue thin veneer of advocacy to her act of sharing a middle school fight video.

There’s really no situation where adults should be sharing fight videos from middle schools. Doing so provides an incentive to children to produce such videos for the thrill of virality, and which means it also produces an incentive for children to attack one another and fight. For a school like Hazelbrook, the virality of the video is the worst possible thing to have happened in the midst of an ongoing struggle to tamp down on videos like these, which the school has already gone as far as banning phones in an attempt to combat according to reporting in the Oregonian.

It should not be too much to ask from Americans to consider whether actions they take in the name of protecting children are helping or harming children, but we’re at a place right now where irresponsible conduct that harms children is repeatedly undertaken in the name of keeping children safe. It needs to stop, and in order for it to stop influencers like Gaines need to start being questioned publicly for their role in making situations like the one in Hazelbrook so much worse.