The case of a trans athlete is a tragedy on multiple levels

A Florida law that destroyed the life of a Broward teen, threatened her mother’s job, tarnished the reputations of six school administrators, sparked student walkouts and created work for 32 trial lawyers has become a wrecking ball.

The 2021 law banned transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams (SB 1028), and this law shows every sign of being based on feelings and not facts. Twice a Senate subcommittee hesitated to approve the bill. It took a backdoor amendment to get it to the governor. One Republican lawmaker left the Senate floor in tears. This bad law has had terrible consequences.

The daughter of the bill’s co-sponsor publicly opposed her own mother’s legislation. That sponsor, Sen. Kelli Stargel, a Republican from Lakeland, said she had received no complaints about transgender athletes, according to a pending federal lawsuit.

No surprise, given the minuscule numbers. According to the UCLA Williams Institute, only 16,200 teens between the ages of 13 and 17 in Florida identified as transgender in 2017.

A manufactured ‘crisis’

If half of them were transgender girls and they all wanted to play on a girls’ sports team in Florida, the “crisis” that lawmakers created would amount to less than 1% of all Florida teens.

This wasn’t a problem that needed a solution, it was a good thing to find a platform, and of course Florida did that.

No one seemed particularly concerned about what would happen to transgender girls like ND, then a high school student from Broward with a passion for football and volleyball.

She identified as a girl at the age of three. During puberty she used hormone blockers. Her gender officially changed on school records in 2017. ND’s mother, Jessica Norton, said then-Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie told her it was allowed.

ND was thriving, her mother told the Broward School Board on Tuesday, speaking publicly for the first time. Now 16, ND 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 cannot explain and cannot excuse the Broward school district’s response, which was simultaneously too fast and too slow.

Before an investigation could even be completed, former Superintendent Peter Licata reassigned four officials to Monarch High in Coconut Creek, where ND attended, including the principal and ND’s mother, Jessica, a technology specialist.

Not satisfied with just one school, the district worked backward, targeting the former ND High School and investigating three other school officials. Then everything came to a standstill. Norton’s reassigned duties include cleaning services. She said she regularly received news about the ongoing investigation from the press — not from the district. That’s unforgivable.

It took six months before a panel finally found this month that there was no clear evidence that six of the seven knew they were breaking the law.

ND’s mother was the exception. The panel recommended that she be suspended for ten days. The new chief inspector, Dr. Howard Hepburn, wants her fired. The council postponed a vote on that request on Tuesday.

The suffering of a family

Norton allowed her child to play girls’ sports despite knowing it was against the law.

The district says it has no idea that the woman it now wants to fire is the same woman who, along with her husband, sued the Broward School District to overturn that law in federal court. The lawsuit is pending.

Similarly, lawyers for the Department of Education, also named in Norton’s lawsuit, had two years to find out who ND and her parents were. Presumably that had nothing to do with the quick warning that Broward officials needed to make sure anyone involved in allowing ND to play suffered “severe consequences.”

ND was effectively uncovered by the school district’s investigation. She left Monarch High the day it was made public and hasn’t returned. She was banned from high school sports for a year.

County investigators sometimes referred to ND as “It,” her mother said, declining 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 is a human being and deserves to be treated as such.”

The Broward School Board cannot give ND back the life she had. It cannot overturn bad laws or end Tallahassee’s callous and horrific record of using children as political pawns in the endless culture wars.

However, the board can do the best. It could let ND’s mother keep her job.

This family has suffered enough.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board includes Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, Editorial Writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinions of the Board of Directors and written by one of its members or a designee. If you would like to contact us, please send an email to [email protected].