Content Warning: This article contains descriptions and depictions of transphobic content and LGBTQ hate speech. To deny these sources ad revenue, we have provided any hate speech source material referenced in this article as archived webpage snapshots.
On May 20th, 2016, a law firm by the name of Johnson Johnson Lucas & Middleton (then called Johnson Johnson & Schaller) put out a press release on the settlement of a lawsuit brought by non-binary teacher Leo Soell against the Gresham-Barlow School District in the amount of $60,000.
Photo Credit: Kristyna Wentz-Graff , TheOregonian/OregonLive
It’s a story you probably never heard about: a relatively innocuous lawsuit settlement in a quiet corner of Oregon during a chaotic month of politics. If you remember, May 2016 was the month Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee. The GOP had decided to fully embrace its nihilistic death drive, yet a small win occurred amidst the chaos.
The story flew under your radar for possibly for the best reasons: you don’t regularly visit hard-right conservative blogs and you’re not a disgusting transphobe. What you’re not seeing is how deep and how fast the wrong kind of story can spread, how deeply rightwing media can misinterpret a story, and how enraged they are at any sort of progressive victory.
Because I’m stupid and I hate life, I decided to do a deep dive into the sewer of conservative blogs and social media to track a single story from its initial headlines to the current day. A solid week of hell clicking on literally every link that was about the story, reading it, and noting whether or not it was positive or negative in coverage, what date/time it was published, and how the story fared on social media.
You’re probably wondering, given the whatever-the-fuck nature of the daily current news, why I’m talking about this story 2 ½ years after it came and went. That’s a good question. This story, as many others, is a trial balloon for conservative media to see just how hateful and grotesque they can be for their audiences dying for cultural war red meat. (To be honest, I don’t even remember how I even heard about it.)
When I first saw the headline, or some variation of it, “Transgender teacher award $60,000 just for being called the wrong gender”, I knew it was being said with a conservative sneer of disgust. The clickbait worked, I clicked, and then my brain began to die almost immediately. I decided to dig through the pain. Like I said, I’m not very smart sometimes.
Many on the left and liberals don’t engage with rightwing media in any depth. Many of us hear about it by its worst, most obviously racist, misogynistic, trans and homophobic takes, content that’s absorbed by most viewers not in that milieu by pure osmosis. This is not critique on you, dear reader, it’s actually for the best.
To brave the depths of rightwing media’s screaming, aimless rage is draining. It’s exhausting. It’s a Sisyphean task. Very little of social value can be squeezed from its content, you kind of know what you’re going to get, yet you can gain invaluable info on how conservatives pick up on, mutant, and spread outrage as the fundamental fuel for their political beliefs.
Most conservatism, and its many varieties, are powered by a sense of fake moral outrage, of something being taken from them, and they are the sole defenders of an ambiguous set of “traditional” values. The content did not surprise me, it’s the scope of what I found that truly shocked me.
Welcome to an examination of the ugly public trial of Leo Soell, whose greatest crime was simply demanding their human dignity.
Shocking Numbers
When researching the extent of Leo’s story, I limited myself to the following rules:
- The story in question had to mention Leo Soell by name
- Not to limit myself to self-described conservative media
- The site had to be in English (translation can be tricky in terms of cultural context)
- Look at the story in relation the rest of the site
Despite looking at all sources regardless of political bent, the story was overwhelmingly popular on conservative media. A story that had no national coverage, not even a mention on Fox News, the response to the lawsuit settlement created an astounding 121 articles, with 72 of them being written in a one week period (5/20/2016 – 5/27/2016). In total, 93% (112) of all articles written about the Soell settlement were negative editorials or negative in the context of the site. Nearly all of conservative websites intentionally misgendered Leo Soell (who goes by they/them), dismissed the lawsuit as culture war gone amok, and were often referencing one of two main sources: a Daily Caller article written 5/23/2016 late evening and a Franklin Graham Facebook post on 5/26/2016 at the crack of dawn.
For a full list of source including all publications, dates, and times researched, plus my notes, click here.
The results should not be shocking. I was less interested in researching the content, whose hate-filled rhetoric did not blow my mind. What I found fascinating is the timeline of the story, how is spread like a malignant tumor, and how the story’s framing fit all too well into the culture war the rightwing is desperately losing. The story was not really about Leo Soell coming out as non-binary, at least not for conservatives. That’s not newsworthy enough for them. It’s the fact that Leo Soell got $60,000 from a school district in a courtroom settlement. The story when framed a particular way activates a triumvirate of caveman brain reactions in extremely online Facebook grandpas: alternate gender identity, public schools, and lawsuits.
The response to the lawsuit settlement created an astounding 121 articles, with 72 of them being written in a one week period (5/20/2016 – 5/27/2016). In total, 93% (112) of all articles written about the Soell settlement were negative.
(Fun fact: this was around the exact same time period the Oklahoma legislature passed a resolution favoring impeaching President Obama over his school bathroom transgender policies. This is a deep pathology.)
Each one of these arenas offers a specific grievance. Alternate gender identity challenges heteronormativity and the Christian idea of the family. Toss in some good old fashioned “14 words” rhetoric about “demographic change” to spice it up. Notoriously anti-science conservatives love to whip on their Bill Nye the Gender Science Guy glasses when gender identity is concerned.
Public schools are seen as secular indoctrination centers. Their alternative is something resembling Christian versions of Taliban madrassas, where everyone has to stand for the flag and anthem and Jesus or else you’ll go in the Bad Box in the hot Texas sun.
Lawsuits, in their eyes, specifically settlements, favor an undeserved victim winning money they didn’t earn. Glance at any random article about another city police dept paying off the family of a slain black man, and you’ll see the exact same frothing vitriol.
The money that Leo Soell received as a settlement (not a judgment) is the trigger. An amazing amount of conservative mental energy is dedicated to being angry about the concept of “unearned” money, especially by groups that they see as their cultural enemies. We’re going to ignore the obvious contradiction of their business deities earning billions from rent, stock dividends, or from the general exploited labor of others.
Facts First
Before I dive into the reaction to the story, let’s clear up the facts about the lawsuit itself. Leo Soell had come out as non-binary in 2015 following a double mastectomy, being the only trans teacher in their school district. In fact, Soell was even interviewed at Portland Pride 2015 carrying a sign proudly stating the first nonbinary teacher at their district. There were only 7 articles about Leo Soell prior to the lawsuit, mostly pro-LGBT profiles and even a photo essay.
Soell decided to come out to their school. Their fellow teachers and staff waged a year-long campaign of harassment, including intentional misgendering, verbal public humiliation, and even collaborating to prevent Soell from using the new gender-neutral bathrooms. This was after the school held a transgender issues training seminar following Soell’s declaration. The Gresham-Barlow School District held its own “investigation” and found there had been “no harassment”. Uh huh. It’s not exactly hard to imagine a relatively small elementary school in a quiet corner of the US to have *gasp* prejudiced people and the school to cover its own ass with an “investigation”.
Thankfully, Leo didn’t accept this absurdity and correctly filed a civil rights lawsuit. Rather than take it to court where they would have lost, the school district settled, revamped their transgender teacher policy, and made training mandatory for all school district staff. Soell got a well-deserved settlement, did a brief interview, and assumed the story was over.
In fact, the story was over. The Oregon Department of Education issued comprehensive guidelines for trans rights 2 weeks before the settlement was announced, most likely in anticipation of the result. The Oregonian posted a brief news story on Friday (the same day as the settlement). There were a smattering of reactions (including the sharp political minds of Gamefaqs.com). The weekend was quiet. Then came Monday.
Cancerous Spread
Tracking this story was like tracking an infection.
Patient Zero for the cancerous growth among conservative media is Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller. Tucker Carlson is the bow-tied twerp with his own show on Fox News, who’s main specialty is worrying about gypsies pooping everywhere despite making a face like he’s always mid-shit. For those of you not familiar with his rag, The Daily Caller is, for a political blog, a very well-funded and staffed news organization with reporters in the White House press pool. It is also a radioactive waste dump of white nationalism and rightwing hysteria masquerading as news. Its average reader is approximately 10,000 years old, deathly afraid of the sun, and drink only the finest virgin blood.
The Daily Caller posted an article about the story on Monday, 5/23 at 9 pm EST, not exactly prime time for a story on a blog to go live. The whole article feels like a slapdash “gotta get content out” type deal that was basically there to fill a slot. I assume The Daily Caller editorial strategy is to play mad libs with conservative outrage and to fill slots based on their reading metrics. “Uh uh uh we need a *checks notes* Black Lives Matter immigrant church shoplifting story.”
The Daily Caller is, for a political blog, a very well-funded and staffed news organization with reporters in the White House press pool. It is also a radioactive waste dump of white nationalism and rightwing hysteria masquerading as news.
The next day 26 negative stories were published, many linking back to The Daily Caller story. 21% of every story written about Leo Soell, for any reason, were generated based on this one post. Remember, this is a story about a $60,000 settlement in a school district no one had ever heard about for any reason.
Some articles in fact, just copy-pasted the Caller story in its entirety adding maybe one or two lines boiling down to “OMFG the libsssss”. The usual suspects are here: Breitbart, Daily Wire, Infowars, IJR. The dipshits at Rebel Media didn’t even bother to spell Leo Soell’s name right. My favorite was from a site called Gay Patriot, a bunch of self-hating Log Cabin Republicans who don’t realize too many of their fellow, uh, “patriots” would likely drag them behind a pickup truck and leave them dead tied to a fence post.
A second wind for the story came on 5/25 at 3:45 AM, evangelical Franklin Graham, son of mega-pastor Billy Graham, posted a transphobic religious screed on Facebook. It gathered 36,000 likes, 5,300 comments, and 16,000 shares. This was obviously designed and timed for your early morning Nana to see it and spill her betablockers all over her Tucker Carlson needlepoint in anger. These series of articles grew like mold on a second series of conservative websites: TradCath and evangelical websites with charming names like Serious Catholics in Politics, End Times Headlines and Prophecy News Watch.
Over the next week, 47 more negative articles were posted until the story ran out of gas by the end of May. Later stories are a smattering of Johnny Come Latelys, including John J Duncan Jr, a Tennessee Congressman who references the lawsuit and Soell by name in an anti-trans statement officially entered into the Congressional record. (He’s a real piece of work, also not seeking re-election last year.)
The articles range from predictable transphobia, to absurd grammar nerds to an article claiming non-binary trans people are like sporks. Liberty Unyielding is making the hilarious claim that if non-binary gender identity is respected, gender will be erased and it’s like we all have to eat our potato salad with sporks. Funny how many conservatives can’t conceptualize complex concepts without comparing them to disposable consumer goods. Sporks are objectively lame, but not as lame as reading this tongue-in-cheek tripe and if you’re the shitty website I am Bored, writing a glowing review of it.
Evangelical Franklin Graham, son of mega-pastor Billy Graham, posted a transphobic religious screed on Facebook. It gathered 36,000 likes, 5,300 comments, and 16,000 shares.Over the next week, 47 more negative articles were posted.
The comments sections of any of these articles, conservative or not, are horror museums of outright hate speech, distilled to “transgender people are mentally ill, they’re exploiting the lib court system, their concerns are the result of a decadent and decaying society of SJW cucks”. Soell is painted as a whiny crybaby who immediately got written a check for being called the wrong name once or twice. Many of them openly advocate violence against Soell for the simple crime of being alive.
These webpages are the best argument possible for just nuking the internet.
Ignore the fact none of their complaints are true. Transgender people’s concerns are not imaginary, and more specifically, the school district settled. It wasn’t even a summary judgment. Irrelevant that the settlement came after a year of abuse. Skim past the lived experiences of millions of trans individuals around the globe. Each article adds an untruth that doesn’t matter in the larger picture to the real audience for this story. Doesn’t matter at all to them. The point of these stories are not to impart of piece of information relevant to your world, it’s to made the reader enraged with such an obvious narrative of “injustice” that no other reaction is considered reasonable. Not just mad, but outraged enough to advocate physically hurting someone or at least click “share” or maybe an ad or two.
The power of this article to spread rapidly and burn out quickly is that the intent of story can be carried with a headline. The headline is the key here: the single sentence needs to encapsulate the disgust and resentment of the reader. The content or context of the outrage is immaterial. The story really exploded on Facebook in terms of reach because it’s a digestible cultural narrative, supplied by a trusted “moral” figure, and can be encapsulated in that single headline. For Racist Facebook Grandpa, it’s got everything you could want: a confluence of conservative grievances almost industrially designed to burst a blood vessel.
Of the 9 positive articles covering the story, they were almost exclusively LGBT news sites. Pink News is the largest news source that posted about the settlement, a full 9 days after it was announced and well after the bulk of the conservative media had already been up for a week.
This wasn’t a failure of LGBT or sympathetic political media to cover this story, mind you. It’s more an indictment of the breadth and scope of conservative media’s infinitely deep well of aimless rage at imaginary enemies, contained in an ever-dying world they claim to be the sole defenders of.
What a grim reality they must see. What a hopeless crusade.
Mutations
This story is a morsel of red meat, its progress is digestion to sustain its host, and at the anus of this digestive tract, a turd named Ryan T. Anderson plops out. Anderson is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and their job is to provide academic, professional legitimacy to hate speech after the screeching has died down.
On 6/5/2016, as the Leo Soell story burnt off, Anderson wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Enquirer titled Government must stay neutral in transgender debate, referencing the Soell lawsuit by name. It’s a smart headline with the appearance of respecting the liberal idea of the neutrality of public debate, playing off the centrist myth that government policy is/should be non-ideological. The lie that human dignity should be debated at all.
He (Ryan T. Anderson) frames a deeply reactionary take cloaked in the language of liberalism… If they’re not careful, liberals end up making their opponent’s arguments for them.
It’s enough to get anyone to dig in, making the reader ask Why should they be neutral? What is the debate? It’s a clever framing device because a transphobe like Anderson knows exactly how to talk to liberal readers of these articles. He frames a deeply reactionary take cloaked in the language of liberalism: support for privacy, the individual rights of courts and their states to prevent government overreach, blah blah blah. If they’re not careful, liberals end up making their opponent’s arguments for them.
Anderson knows his audience: the chumps who take these arguments as good faith propositions, misguided into thinking conservative reactionaries actually even care about the liberal conceit of objective debate. The article headline on the Philly Enquirer is morally incorrect, but not terribly sensationalized, a key distinction. That is, until he posts the exact same article 2 days later on 6/7, this time on the Heritage Foundation with the changed title Government Shouldn’t Impose Transgender Ideology on Nation. Exact same article to the word, save the headline. Exact same sentiment, now recontextualized.
See what he did there? He snuck transphobic content into a major newspaper under the guise of liberal debate, then posted the exact same garbage on his own organizations page as a transphobic op-ed. Even the word “ideology” carries new meaning. “Ideology” is something liberals have, always carrying a sinister and insidious undertone. Ideology is always creeping into media, sports, educations, and by gosh, even business. Ideology is a dirty word. It is a slur.
But he doesn’t stop there. He has a long memory, and references the Soell case again almost 2 years later in his book When Harry Became Sally in chapter 8 titled “Ideology”. The title of this book kills me. When Harry Met Sally (the film) is a 30 year old romantic comedy about the tension between platonic and heterosexual relationships, with its most famous scene being a woman realistically faking an orgasm to prove that men are sexual dipshits sometimes. Way to get the point of that movie, Ryan.
Leo, Themself
For all the pointless ink written on this settlement, all the anger and rage directed at Leo Soell for absolutely no good reason, this truth is that conservatives are losing this culture war. Badly. They are completely on the defensive in full frothing reactionary mode. They may fight and drag this out to the heat death of the universe, but human dignity and the inevitable expansion of identity will not, cannot be stopped. It’s propelled forward by the courage and demands of people who have decided to no longer be silent in the face of bigotry. They do not always win, but they always fight. And perhaps that is enough to push the momentum of society towards justice, at least a little bit in the case of the settlement and the ongoing, growing movement for trans rights.
I talked a lot about the numbers here, how many articles, how many retweets and such. The extent of the transphobia around this small story was paints a dire portrait of hate, but one that we can’t look away from.
This story below does not:
Despite all their bloviating, hatred and judgment, you know who all these rightwing article authors never bothered to talk to? Leo Soell.
I contacted Soell and asked for their perspective on their experience. Soell politely declined to be interviewed. They did however, provide an interview done by a student at their school:
When I asked Soell what they wanted to say to nonbinary kids, they said, “I see you, you are awesome, your gender is valid, and you are resisting oppression simply by existing. You are not alone and there is a whole crew of rad adults ready to support your liberation. People, who love you for exactly who you are, are your people. As non-binary trans people, hope is activism.“
They added, “To quote my birthday twin and the original person to start Pride and Stonewall, Marsha J. Johnson, a famous black trans woman activist, ‘No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.'”
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.