WCAX removes story that led to transphobic attacks on Randolph student

A Vermont television station has deleted the online version of a news story that garnered national attention and provoked a barrage of transphobic messages toward a transgender Randolph student and her family.

Links to the original story from Sept. 28 on the website for WCAX now turn up an error message and related social media posts have disappeared. The story’s deletion was first reported by Seven Days.

WCAX’s story quoted a Randolph Union High School volleyball player who objected to a transgender teammate’s use of a school locker room. The story was then cited in media reports by Fox News, the New York Post and Britain's Daily Mail tabloid.

Roger Garrity, WCAX’s news director, said in an email that he made the decision to pull the story “so that others could not continue to use our reporting to attack people in the transgender community.”

While the story is no longer available online, Garrity said that WCAX had not retracted it, which generally happens when a news outlet no longer stands by the veracity of its reporting. The 2-minute, 41-second report, he said, was “intended to examine an apparent gap in state education policy that pits students against each other.”

Garrity also said that WCAX is “working on a message” to its viewers that acknowledges how the story has been used to attack the transgender teen. “We strongly condemn anyone who uses our journalism to cause harm to others,” he said.

VTDigger reported last week that the family of the transgender student disputed elements of the story and faced significant transphobic messages and online posts following the national media reports. The website for the Orange Southwest Supervisory District was hacked and subsequently disabled by the district.

Layne Millington, superintendent of the Orange Southwest Supervisory District, which includes Randolph Union High School, called WCAX’s story “probably the most irresponsible story I’ve ever seen” in more than three decades working in education.

“It was very one-sided and, unfortunately, when things are one-sided and only presenting one view, it's predictably going to lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation in terms of how people react to it, which is kind of what happened,” Millington said Wednesday.

Millington estimated that about 150 people had gathered at the high school Tuesday night for the first of two community forums about the issue.

“It was civil,” Millington said. “And I appreciated that an awful lot. I think there were some good ideas that were shared and, hopefully, if nothing else, that got people to think about the broader implications of everything that's happened here.”

The decision to remove a story, rather than to update or correct it, can be a difficult one, according to Dan Kennedy, a media critic and professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

“When you have a story that's causing a lot of harm and has very little news value, you don't really want to leave it in place so that it continues to do harm,” Kennedy said in an interview. “Even if most of the harm that that story can do has already been done. So how do you handle it?”

Kennedy also referred to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which has a directive to “minimize harm.” Kennedy points out to his students that, contrary to popular belief, “it doesn’t mean ‘do no harm.’”

“But what it suggests is, you don't harm people, unless there's a public service component to it (or) unless it serves the public interest,” Kennedy said. After learning the facts of the WCAX story, he said, he didn’t believe there was a “good reason” for the harm caused to the transgender student.

Again, when Freepers find out that this problem is much deeper than a jokey response to scanning just the headline, they disappear.

"Asked to address the girls’ discomfort, Sivvy suggested the girls “ask themselves what it would feel like for them to have their bodies not match their brains,” if they “woke up one morning and had different anatomy.”
Parents who spoke with The Daily Signal said they do not want biological boys in their daughters’ locker rooms, and they are bewildered as to why the school system apparently prioritizes the needs of students who identify as transgender over the needs of their daughters.
Sivvy accused parents of “sexualizing their children to serve their own agenda.” (Ed. note: This is a standard talking point, and playing this card is tantamount to admitting Sivvy is merely fomenting her own hatreds against a small Vermont town via Munchhausen-Tranny-By-Proxy. Oh, and yeah, sue me you *****).
The girls who spoke with The Daily Signal alleged that the student who identifies as transgender watched while they and their teammates were changing in the locker room. They also alleged that the biologically male trans-identifying student said, “My male instincts are kicking in,” referring to another female students’ breasts, and said of a female student who had spoken to a local outlet about the situation: “I’m going to f—ing kill someone,” before allegedly adding, “I f—ing hate” the female student.
“The things my child is being accused of is implausible at best,” Sivvy said in a Facebook message on Monday. “And this is the truth about why the locker rooms are closed to the team right now: to protect my child and her allies from being harassed any further.”
“White privilege cis het girls are used to getting what they want and getting away with it,” the trans-identifying student’s guardian said in a Facebook message. “I certainly didn’t realize how much privilege I’ve been afforded in my life until the full extent of the bigotry in this town has made my child afraid for her life and reluctant to go to school every day now.”
Sivvy accused the girls and their parents who have spoken out on the matter of planting “terrible ideas about transgender youth in the minds of the local public.”

The left believes in something which defies the most basic economic principles and human nature.

So yes, they have to lie.

1. They have to pretend that human nature isn’t full of sin. Humanity has to be good in order for their ideas to work.

2. Also, basic economic principles need ignored or pushed aside because their “philosophy on life” implements concepts that are destructive for economic growth in every way.

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