Utah school board member Natalie Cline finds herself in hot water. Cline has drawn the ire of nearly everyone by mistaking a young basketball player for being transgender and then having the audacity to talk about it on social media. Apparently, in Utah, the new worst insult you can hurl at someone is to call them transgender. One must wonder how such a vile notion could ever even come to reside in the presumably educated and knowledgeable Cline’s head.
The license for Cline’s ignorant notion was issued by the Utah Legislature when it passed SB16 banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth, signed into law by our kind-hearted and competent-most-of-the-time governor.
Like the graveyards full of dead Covid anti-vaxxers, members of the state Legislature chose to ignore the overwhelming medical opinion on the subject and instead did “their own research.” SB16 is a master class in bullying. Perhaps never before in the state of Utah has the power of elected government been used so horrendously to stab venom-tipped spears into the hearts of our most vulnerable citizens. I suspect the only person who will come out of this experience wiser is the young athlete who by no fault of her own finds herself at the center of this controversy. For she now fully understands, if only for a moment, what it is like to be transgender in the state of Utah.
Does Natalie Cline deserve professional corporal punishment? It seems that in the world we now live in, one mistake is all it takes. Forgiveness has become an outdated cliché.
As our state representatives, the same people who gave us SB16, line up to shove Cline’s head into the path of the guillotine, we should hope that they would first pause for some reflection into their own behavior.
G.D. Anderson, Huntsville
