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Brad Kramer wrote (Tribune on Jan 4 in the Republican column) about a Loudoun County rape of a girl by a biological male student that identified as female and assaulted her in the girl’s restroom. Mr. Kramer did not get his facts correct and misled his readers. His was a bias narrative, as several other statements in the same column. This letter only corrects this one.

During the juvenile court hearing a fuller picture of her ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious, but it had nothing at all to do with trans-bathroom policies (or celebrating diversity). Instead, like too many women, she was a victim of relationship male violence.

She testified under oath that she had previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the girl’s school bathroom. On the day of the assault, they had agreed to meet up again — the evidence shows that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to just talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations. The boy, however, expected sex and would not accept her refusal and then brutally sexually assaulted her. The boy (self-identified himself as gender neutral not transgender) was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt did not authorize him to use the girl’s bathroom because there was no school policy if force. The school districts trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girl’s bathroom under the guise of that to assault a victim as Mr. Kramer asserted.

There was plenty of warnings about this boy by classmates and staff weeks before the assault, but they were not acted on. The boy was transferred to another school, where he sexually assaulted another girl, but it was in a classroom, not the girl’s bathroom like Mr. Kramer stated.

The American University IRW investigation from 2015 to 2020 found that there were over 12,000 total sexual assaults in Virginia schools: 4,200-plus sexual harassment complaints, 5,554 complaints of offensive sexual touching, 1,359 sexual offenses without force, 163 cases of sexual battery, 22 aggravated sexual battery by staff and nine cases of forceable rape. Just about every one of these was by heterosexual straight men/boys. Straight heterosexual men/boy are the problem, not transgender students.

Brad Wedge
Albert Lea