Editorial: Story of a Florida teen outed, harassed and driven from school reveals cruelty of Florida anti-trans law
A Florida law that shattered the life of a Broward teenager, threatened her mother’s job, smeared the reputations of six school administrators, triggered student walkouts and provided work for 32 trial lawyers has become a wrecking ball.
The 2021 law barred transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams (SB 1028), and it bears all the signs of being based on feelings, not facts. Twice a Senate subcommittee balked at passing it. It took an 11th-hour, back-door amendment to get it to the governor. One Republican lawmaker left the Senate floor in tears. This bad law has had terrible outcomes.
The daughter of the bill’s co-sponsor publicly opposed her own mother’s legislation. That sponsor, Sen. Kelli Stargel, a Lakeland Republican, said she had received no complaints about transgender athletes, according to a pending federal lawsuit.
No surprise, given the minuscule numbers. In 2017, only 16,200 Florida teens between age 13 and 17 identified as transgender, according to the UCLA Williams Institute.
A manufactured ‘crisis’
If half of them were transgender girls and every one of them wanted to play on a girls’ sports team in Florida, the “crisis” that so set off lawmakers amounts to less than 1% of all Florida teenagers.
This was not a problem needing a solution, it was a sound bite seeking a platform, and naturally Florida obliged.
No one seemed terribly concerned about what would happen to transgender girls like D.N., then a Broward middle schooler with a passion for soccer and volleyball.
She identified as a girl at age three. At puberty, she took hormone blockers. Her gender officially changed on school records in 2017. D.N.’s mother, Jessica Norton, said then-Broward School Superintendent Robert Runcie told her it was allowed.
D.N. thrived, her mother told the Broward School Board Tuesday, as she spoke publicly for the first time. Now 16, D.N. was president of her freshman and sophomore classes, director of student government philanthropy and a homecoming princess.
How one bad law damaged lives
It took one bad law and one anonymous tip about her gender to change all that.
But bad state law won’t explain and can’t excuse the Broward school district’s response, which was simultaneously too fast and too slow.
Before an investigation could even be finished, former Superintendent Peter Licata reassigned four officials at Monarch High in Coconut Creek where D.N. attended, including the principal and D.N.’s mother, Jessica, a technology specialist.
Not content with just one school, the district worked backwards, targeting D.N.’s former middle school and investigating three other school officials. Then everything ground to a halt. Norton’s reassigned duties included janitorial services. She said she frequently got news of the lingering investigation from the press — not from the district. That’s inexcusable.
It took half a year for a panel to finally determine this month there was no clear evidence that six of the seven knew they were breaking the law.
D.N.’s mother was the exception. The panel recommended she be suspended 10 days. The new superintendent, Dr. Howard Hepburn, wants her fired. The Board delayed a vote on that request Tuesday.
A family’s suffering
Norton allowed her child to play girls’ sports, despite knowing it was against the law.
The district says it had no idea that the woman it now seeks to fire is the same woman who, with her husband, sued the Broward School District to overturn that law in federal court. The suit is pending.
Similarly, attorneys for the state Department of Education, also named in Norton’s suit, had two years to figure out who D.N. and her parents were. Presumably, that had nothing to do with its rapid-fire warning that Broward officials should make sure anyone involved in allowing D.N. to play suffered “serious consequences.”
D.N. was effectively outed by the school district investigation. She left Monarch High the day it was made public and hasn’t been back. She was banned from high school sports for a year.
Investigators for the district sometimes referred to D.N. as “It,” her mother said, and refused to use her legal name or gender.
“She was probably one of the favorites on the team that everyone loved,” Jordan Campbell, captain of the volleyball team, told NBC-6. “She’s a human, and deserves to be treated like one.”
The Broward School Board can’t return D.N. to the life she had. It can’t undo bad law or stop Tallahassee’s callous and atrocious record of using children as political pawns in its endless culture wars.
The Board can do the next best thing, however. It can let D.N.’s mother keep her job.
This family has suffered enough.
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
