Imagine your own daughter facing disciplinary actions for refusing to change in the locker room with a boy. A few years ago, that was an unimaginable scenario, but today? It is the new normal and is exactly what’s happening to a Vermont highschool volleyball team.
Daily Signal was able to sit down and interview the girls and their families. It is worth a watch and I hope these girl’s find the support they’re going to need to fight this:
“Daily Signal team traveled up the coast this week to the town of Randolph in northeastern Vermont, just in time to catch the last few days of the town’s beautiful fall foliage. We wanted to meet these girls, cheerful young ladies who chatted with us over pancakes and coffee. They shared their stories and anxieties from the past few weeks of tension and acknowledged the risks of publicly addressing such a controversial topic:
During a well-attended Tuesday evening forum with parents, school Superintendent Layne Millington claimed that coverage of the girls’ pushback has sparked hatred and bigotry toward both the trans-identifying student and the school district. And other parents and students criticized Blake and her family for speaking up on the matter.
Parents who spoke with The Daily Signal said the superintendent and the forum did not focus on the most pressing matter at hand: their daughters’ discomfort at having a biologically male student in the locker room able to observe them while they are changing.”
Early on a foggy Wednesday morning, we met up with some of these young ladies at the local bowling alley-turned-diner. Nervous to speak out, but determined to speak her truth, each girl sat down, mic’d up, and offered her own explanation as to why she believes her voice is not being respected.
Here is the thing, the girls all say that they don’t have a problem with the student but are understandably uncomfortable with being forced to undress around a male student.
“A male was in our locker room when volleyball girls were trying to get changed,” said Blake. “And after I asked him to leave, he didn’t, and later looked over at girls with their shirts off. And it made many people uncomfortable and feel violated. And I left as soon as I could in a panic.”
“It’s not fully the trans student’s fault,” she added. “It is much more the school board’s fault and they’re failing everyone. Not just the volleyball team, not the transgender student. They did nothing to help this situation. They still aren’t. They just want people to be in trouble and they’re not trying to help make a change.”
A female member of the volleyball team who identified herself as Lilly claimed at Tuesday evening’s forum that none of the girls in the locker room were changing when the trans-identifying student entered the room. Kayla, one of the volleyball players who sat down with us, says that’s simply not true.
“Everyone was at different points of changing,” she explained. “Some girls were already dressed, some girls weren’t dressed at all, some girls were in the middle of changing.”
“So why would someone say that they weren’t?” I asked her.
“I feel like everyone’s just trying to twist the story on us and make us look like the bad people in this situation,” the high school student said.
The trans-identifying student’s guardian, Melissa Sivvy, has insisted to The Daily Signal that her child is a girl, deserves to use the girls’ locker room, and never behaved inappropriately.
Offered a chance to respond to this story, the child’s guardian asked The Daily Signal to explain what “biologically male” means and what the girls meant by saying that they were uncomfortable having her child in their space while they were changing.
“Your child is biologically male, correct?” I asked Sivvy on Wednesday evening.
She responded: “Do you think adults should be thinking about what is under children’s clothing? Seems a little inappropriate to me.”
The school has taken down its website and I assume it’s because the girls have received overwhelming support from the community. The student may face disciplinary action as a result of their bravery, which could prevent some of them from attending the college of their choice.