A school official in West Virginia is facing an unpaid suspension for allegedly bullying a transgender student in the male restroom, saying, “You freak me out,” among other things. The allegations and the aftermath of the events, which prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to intervene, show the complexities that transgender lifestyles present in schools today.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports that, according to the Jan. 8 school board meeting, the assistant principal is now on unpaid suspension through Feb. 1.
Harrison Schools Superintendent Mark Manchin, a cousin of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., had originally announced on Dec. 18 that Lee Livengood was on paid suspension. After being informed in a separate board meeting a couple weeks ago that several board members did not agree with a paid suspension, Manchin agreed to revoke that stance.
According to the letter sent by the ACLU to school administrators, several weeks after the teen and parents met with the school about the incident, Livengood allegedly asked the transgender boy to prove he was a boy while the two were using the restroom on Nov. 27. “While Michael was still using the facilities in the stall, Mr. Livengood came into the restroom and began questioning Michael as to why he was using the restroom,” the ACLU said in a letter to Manchin. “Shockingly, Mr. Livengood then challenged Michael to ‘come out here and use the urinal,’ if he was really a boy.”
This incident reveals several layers of problems: Mark Manchin admitted that there is no written policy on the issue of transgender people and bathroom use, and the county school system doesn’t allow transgender students to use the restrooms matching their gender identities; instead, they can use a private restroom or the one that matches the sex on their birth certificate. As it stands, the situation also appears to be a case of “he said, she said.” One wouldn’t expect a student to be able to prove the incident occurred. Yet at the same time, Livengood denies asking the student to prove he was male by using the urinal, as the ACLU suggests in its letter.
None of this makes it okay for Livengood, or anyone in a position of authority, or anyone else, to bully a child. For people who stand firmly rooted in the fact that biology is obvious at birth (some say “assigned” at birth, but that doesn’t seem quite accurate either) and that gender is not fluid, this new effort to allow this ideology to infiltrate schools is frustrating. Still, it’s wrong to bully children or young adults in this position (adults, too, but transgender news stories seems to focus mostly on children in schools). These kids are no doubt struggling inwardly with gender dysphoria, a desire to fit in with the newest trend — in the Wall Street Journal, Abigail Shrier calls it a “social contagion” — and who knows what else.
If an adult in a position of authority at a school believes there is a privacy issue at stake or a problem that might adversely affect the other students, it should have been addressed privately with the student, parents, and other members of the school’s administrations — not with snarky comments toward the student. On the other hand, whether accurate or not, once the ACLU gets involved, it’s difficult to get out from underneath the suffocating torrent of progressivism it now represents. Now that the transgender lobby has been recognized by various school systems nationwide, complicated issues like this involving bullying, anecdotes, lawsuits, and suspensions will only continue.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
