By John Klar

Several girls on Vermont’s Randolph Union High School Girls Volleyball Team made national news last year when they objected to a biologically male student who identifies as a woman watching them undress. One of the girls, Blake Allen, spoke out publicly in an interview with WCAX in Vermont, and then on Tucker Carlson and many other national and international programs. Blake’s father Travis was fired as a coach for Facebook comments that “misgendered” the gawking student as “him.”

Travis Allen and his daughter Blake have faced repercussions from speaking out against a biological boy being in the girls’ locker room at Blake’s school, Randolph Union High School.

The Allens were targeted by toxic woke activists for standing up against this invasion of the girls’ privacy. Students were not allowed to possess opinions that differed from the school’s far-left and decidedly un-scientific ideological gender flip, emboldened by Vermont laws that similarly ignore women’s rights in favor of unsettled (and unsettling) trans-ideology. In this the Allens are and have been ahead of the ideological curve, together with many European and other countries that have put the brakes on this extremist “social justice” movement to evaluate impacts on society.

The dishonesty displayed by Vermont’s extremist wokesters has been on full display in the Blake Allen case. Pressured politically, WCAX removed Blake’s truthful interview, while Seven Days and VTDigger fabricated a false narrative portraying Blake and the other girls as agitating transphobes. But then VTDigger interviewed “Rabbit,” the biological male deluded that he is a girl. Rabbit related facts that are exactly consistent with what these girls alleged — that he was watching them change and he refused to leave when they asked for him to stop watching them. He portrayed himself as the victim, and insisted they were hateful because he is a girl and had a right to watch them disrobe. (Of course, Rabbit didn’t mention that the same thing happened the year before, with some other girls he was highly inappropriate towards).

The framing of this controversy has been dominated by liberal school administrators allied with an extremely progressive Vermont media engaged in bizarre proaganda, seeking to ignore these girls’ rights in favor of trans-gender theory. This is not rocket science—it’s not science of any kind. Science measures facts; trans-ideology rests on feelings. But girls feeling violated or threatened are verboten feelings.

Similarly, Vermont laws have for years permitted minor children to choose to switch genders using experimental hormone blockers, without parental consent. It is not hateful to harbor concerns for these children. Indeed, it is hateful to set these legitimate warning signs aside in pursuit of the feel-good insanity of trans ideology. The FACTS are that: minors should have limits on what decisions they make, as to sexual consent, smoking and drug use, when they can marry, and when they can take life-altering drugs; hormone blockers are experimental, and there are no long-term studies of their impacts on children; no amount of hormones and/or surgeries can change a person’s immutable gender, or the hormones that accord therewith; disclosures for gender hormones (one each for the binary gender hormones of testosterone and estrogen) list the numerous risks these children undertake, including cancers, lifetime infertility, and a myriad of unknown side effects.

RUHS continues to impose its unjustified and extremist ideology on biology-believing students, and deprive kids of any divergent opinion. The dispute of which the Allens have been the center will continue to divide and agitate normal learning of core subjects in favor of blistering attacks on anyone who dares question the New Orthodoxy.

Fortunately, Alliance Defending Freedom undertook to protect the Allens from these unconstitutional violations of their civil rights by school authorities. Layne Millington invoked the Southern Poverty Law Center as authority to label ADF a hate group. But the SPLC defines a hate group as any organization that does not endorse LGBTQ+ ideology (religiosity). Which is to say, Millington and his woke cronies are failing children by denying them a proper traditional education in core subjects, and define anyone who dares take issue as hateful. This is Draconian moral compulsion, by the Woke Cult of Stupid. Millington is the hater, and he has displayed this to the surrounding community repeatedly with his infantile antics. (As part of the settlement, Millington’s rants against those who disagree with him will be taken down. As if his slanders can be cancelled as easily as he and his ilk seek to erase biological facts).

Blake Allen and her family are heroes for standing up for children being ideologically and chemically experimented upon, and for defending women’s rights to 1) free speech, 2) fairness in sporting competitions, and 3) privacy while disrobed. In the interview I had with them at their home on May 28, I asked them about their feelings about this dispute, and whether they harbor any regrets about standing up for what is right. As the interview shows, this family have made sacrifices on behalf of others, and have been unfairly attacked for doing so.

And they’d do it again.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. Reprinted with permission from the Small Farm Republic blog.