He Said He Was Attacked, Then Said He Wasn't

I have always said that The Gays are like the Visa card; everywhere that you want to be. I mean, we work, pay our taxes, mow our lawns, take care of our homes, children, pets, lives; we go to church, or don’t, we belong to gyms, or don’t; we’re normal, in that regard, like most everyone else.

But, we are also thieves and liars and adulterers and murderers and criminals; we are rude and uneducated and just plain mean; we’re normal, in that regard, like most everyone else.

Still, I get especially angry at members of our community when they do things that might not make me as angry were they done by the heterosexual folks.

As in the tale of a transgender teenager — a fifteen-year-old at Hercules Middle/High School in Hercules, California — who said he was beaten and sexually assaulted in a school bathroom.

The teen, who is biologically female but identifies as male, told police he was leaving a boy's bathroom one morning when three other boys pushed him inside a large stall and attacked him. Officers took his statement and opened an investigation that included a sexual assault examination, but the investigation only uncovered more questions than answers, such as the time frame for when the attack allegedly occurred and the lack of any physical injuries to his head, face and hands.

Now, it turns out, the boy has admitted that he made the entire story up.

That’s right, when members of the LGBT community are being assaulted daily around the world, and when we have to fight to have the attacks and beatings and assaults and murders dubbed hate crimes, this young boy decided to lie about it.

And no one seems to know why because the boy isn’t talking about that part. Detective Connie Van Putten of the Hercules Police Department said she could not speculate as to why the boy had lied, but seemed to suggest that she’s leaving the door open to charge the teen with making a false police report.

Who knows why he lied, what made him lie, but the fact that he did lie bothers me greatly. Now, whenever someone reads a report of a transgender teen, or adult, being assaulted, there’s going to be that shadow of doubt. Did it really happen? Is it all a lie?

On the plus side, a spokesman for the West Contra Costa Unified School District, said school officials are less concerned with punishing the student than making sure he gets the support he needs to feel safe and comfortable at school:

"We recognize that life is complicated, and at the end of the day this is a request for help."

And hopefully he will get the help he needs if he did lie, though some believe it may have something to do with a similar situation at the same school last fall, when there was an on-campus fight involving another transgender student and three girls that was captured in a cellphone video.

That transgender teenager, Jewlyes Gutierrez, a biological male who identifies as female, was charged with misdemeanor assault, but asserted that she had repeatedly complained about being harassed at school for being transgender before she fought back.

So, did this other student make the whole thing up, for attention for himself, for attention to an ugly situation at Hercules High School? Or, as Ben-David Barr, executive director of the Rainbow Community Center, which sponsors LGBT youth groups in Contra Costa County, seems to suggest, maybe he was pressured by his family or law enforcement to recant his story.

And that would also be awful, as it would send the message that if you are gay or transgender and are assaulted, it’s best to keep quiet about it.

It reminds me of another story that I posted here about a man who said he was attacked for being gay when all that happened was that he did a back-flip on a sidewalk and landed on his face [JosephBaken: The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf], and the guy who said he was burned and hit with a pipe for being gay, only he was lying [Quinn Matley Is A Liar...TheWorst Kind]. Had either of those stories been true, or this story of the transgender teen been true, they would have been Hate Crimes.

As it stands now, since all three appear to be lies, those crimes are Hateful Crimes. As I said, we are all kinds of people, good and bad, right and wrong, but all it takes are a few bad apples and our whole community gets labeled by those on the Conservative Right. We lie; we make up stories; there is no such thing as a Hate Crime.

We need to stop this; it serves no purpose to anyone.

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