How misinformation drove debates over transgender students and bathrooms in Arizona
A member of the Chandler Unified School Board was certain that states banned transgender individuals from reversing any steps they took to change their gender identity. No state has done so.
A parents’ rights activist from north of Tucson said he knew of cases where males pretended they were transgender solely to enter a girls’ restroom. He could cite no examples.
A Republican activist living in the Estrella Mountain Ranch subdivision west of Phoenix said he’d read an article that children were undergoing sexual reassignment surgeries without parental permission. He couldn’t locate it.
These wrong or exaggerated beliefs fueled the fervor in the men to battle what they saw as an effort in Arizona public schools to encourage students to question their gender identity.
And as discussions about transgender students roiled school board meetings across the state in 2023 — particularly about bathroom use — political organizations and conservative think tanks further amplified or distorted fears.
An employee of Turning Point USA logged hundreds of miles in 2023 visiting at least 14 Arizona school board meetings in nine different districts, mainly to speak on issues involving transgender students.
A representative of another conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, engaged in the issue and suggested that the controversy would serve Republicans well in the 2024 election.
“I think it’s a winning issue that energizes parents,” said Jason Bedrick, research fellow of education policy at the Heritage Foundation.
So far, the issue is a talking point. No policies have changed despite the public pressure, according to the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Office.
The misinformation surrounding the issue reached into that office, the highest dealing with education statewide.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said districts had created the controversy this year by adopting new policies allowing transgender students access to the facilities of their choice.
The Arizona Republic asked which districts had done so. In a follow-up interview, Horne said his office researched and could not find any instance of a district adopting a new policy in 2023.
Rather, a review of district meetings showed the issue arose at multiple school board meetings because parents and community members asked that districts alter long-established policies and practices of non-discrimination.
In some districts, an isolated incident or individual prompted an initial response from a handful of concerned parents. However, those concerns morphed into a broad-based fear of what might happen should transgender students use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity.
The issue took up dozens of hours of school board meeting time. In some districts, including in Peoria and Catalina Foothills, transgender students, recent graduates and their families served as a counterweight at board meetings. Some would cite statistics about the suicide rate among transgender youth. Some would speak about the personal emotional stakes.
Alex Cramton, a transgender student in the Catalina Foothills district, told board members at an April meeting that the risk escalated the more students were discriminated against.
“While parents may be concerned about their daughter’s well-being in a bathroom, I can assure I am more concerned for my own safety on the average day,” she told the board.
'This is not a kid issue’
The issue also took an emotional toll on the elected volunteers who serve as board members.
The president of the Catalina Foothills School Board, Eileen Jackson, said board members in the Tucson-area district got used to board meetings where they faced repeated accusations that they were pedophiles, or wanted to “groom” children into a lifestyle.
“We’ve gotten used to what I hope is hyperbole,” she said. “You have to have a fairly thick skin to do this, and ours gets thicker every day.”
Jackson said the meetings where the bathroom issue dominated public comment, particularly an April 4 meeting, felt orchestrated. Several vehicles in the parking lot had stickers promoting the same church, she said. And three people who signed in to speak listed their address as the location of the Pima County Republican Party.
The issue has not come from parents in the district, she said. No female students have told her they were worried about transgender students using the girls’ room.
“This is not a kid issue,” Jackson said. “It seems to be an issue of parents and their fears.”
The furor has not resulted in any concrete changes, however.
The Catalina Foothills board has not put the issue on the agenda for discussion.
In April, the Peoria Unified board rejected by a 3-2 vote a policy that would have restricted transgender students’ access to bathrooms. A recall campaign against a transgender school board member in the Liberty Elementary district in Buckeye failed.
However, a governing board member on the Mesa School Board has sued her own district over its transgender bathroom policy. And officials in four districts that saw bond measures fail in 2023, including Mesa, say the furor over culture war issues bled into the fiscal policy decision.
Kurt Rohrs, who was elected to the Chandler Unified School Board in 2022, is generally aligned with parents pushing anti-transgender policies, but he said the discussion about the issue isn’t rooted in fact.
The anecdotes and arguments around transgender students are so rife with falsehoods that it was best to just accept that parents were reacting to a stew of misinformation.
“Parents are reacting this way because they are fearful,” he said. “It’s clearly not rational. It’s emotional.”
Rohrs, in an interview with The Republic, added to the pot of misinformation by suggesting some states banned so-called “de-transitioning,” which is a transgender person reversing any steps taken to change their gender. No state has a ban like that.
Pressed on it in a follow-up interview, it turned out that was Rohrs exaggerating a hypothetical scenario involving a runaway who became a ward of the state. But, Rohrs said, the truth didn’t matter.
“Trying to logically work your way through it is kind of pointless,” he said.
And Rohrs said he understood why groups like Turning Point USA would seize upon such emotion. “There’s always political gain in fear,” he said.
For Daniel Trujillo, a 16-year-old transgender student in the Catalina Foothills district, the furor is much ado about nothing.
He said that entering the boys’ room at his school can sometimes feel like an act of political rebellion. But only because so much has been made of that action in school board meetings at his district.
“I’m just taking a tinkle,” he said. “It’s not that deep.”
Turning Point USA employee appears at 14 board meetings
In January, members of Turning Point USA set up a table in the lobby of the Peoria Unified School District ahead of a board meeting. A district official told them that wasn’t allowed on public school property. The Turning Point people started taking down the table topped with white linen.
But as they did, one, Tiffany Benson, made this promise: We’re not going anywhere.
Conservative organizations have seized upon fears about what is taught in Arizona classrooms.
The Goldwater Institute, in conjunction with two self-styled parental rights groups, held an August symposium billed as a back-to-school event for parents. It barred The Republic from covering it. The think tank that usually welcomes publicity also refused to make an expert available for an interview to discuss the classroom matters it was concerned with.
The Heritage Foundation expanded its focus to include transgender issues in 2023.
Jason Bedrick of The Heritage Foundation spoke at a Moms for Liberty event in Mesa in September and said the conservative movement had erred by focusing only on school choice in years past and not looking at what was taught in public school classrooms.
“Education,” he said, in an interview after he was leaving the event, “is the dinner table issue.”
Arguably the most active conservative group in this sphere is the Phoenix-based Turning Point USA. It was started by Charlie Kirk, who also has a top-rated talk show and has aligned himself with former President Donald Trump.
At a Turning Point event held at a north Phoenix church Aug. 6, Kirk said that he previously had shied away from speaking on transgender issues, despite having growing concerns. He said that “people in charge” he spoke with assured him that these issues were relatively small.
But, Kirk said, he has come to believe that a “transgender mafia” has worked to impose its will. Kirk said that his beliefs are shared by the wider community but that it was cowed into silence.
“The one issue I think is so against our sense, so against the natural law and, dare I say, a throbbing middle finger to God, is the transgender thing happening in America now,” Kirk said.
Benson, the Turning Point employee, has spoken at 14 school board meetings across nine districts in 2023, according to a Republic computer-assisted analysis of publicly available minutes. She has attended more meetings without addressing the board.
Her interest has spanned metro Phoenix, from as far east as Apache Junction and as far west as Buckeye, the town where the Liberty Elementary School District holds its meetings. Benson also has made the two-hour drive to Catalina Foothills.
“You never know what board room I will show up in,” she told listeners of her podcast, “Deeper Thoughts.”
Benson did not speak at that Jan. 12 meeting in Peoria, her home district where Turning Point tried setting up a table to hand out literature. But, on her podcast, she said she hoped that by showing up with other Turning Point representatives, she empowered the parents who did.
“Of course, I had the backing of arguably one of the most controversial and constitutionally driven organizations, conservative organizations, in America,” she said on a since-deleted episode of her podcast. “I mean Turning Point USA is there, it’s a frontrunner. It’s a leader. I consider it an honor to be affiliated with that organization.”
A spokesperson for Turning Point USA, Andrew Kolvet, told The Republic that Benson was going to the school board meetings on her own time and not as part of her Turning Point duties.
Earlier this year, Kolvet initially told a reporter for the Peoria Independent that Benson did not work for Turning Point at all, but then reversed himself.
Most often, Benson has discussed gender identity at school board meetings, expressing concerns about bathroom access. In doing so, she has said that she does not believe someone could question their identity.
“There are only two genders: male and female,” she told the Chandler Unified School Board on April 12. “There’s nothing fluid or transition about this Biblical, biological and physical reality.”
In a January meeting before the Liberty Elementary district board, Benson turned her ire on Paul Bixler, a transgender woman who sits on the board. Benson said Bixler, through her mere presence at schools, was drawing attention to gender. She said that was “equivalent to drawing attention to sex and sexuality.
“When this involves children,” she said, “we call it pedophilia.”
Benson has accused board members of damaging children through policies that deal with transgender individuals and with curriculums that she asserts sexualize children.
On May 10, she said board members at Higley Unified School District were “pedophiles by proxy.”
Reached outside a Peoria meeting in August, Benson refused to answer questions from a Republic reporter. She referred questions to the Turning Point spokesperson.
‘Infuriate and inflame, only for political gain’
Benson and another Turning Point employee, Ben Larrabee, have helped organize groups of citizens to speak at school board meetings.
Both spoke to the Estrella Mountain Republican Club about the goings-on at Liberty Elementary, said Butch Kuentzler, the chair of the group. Kuentzler said his group has started monitoring school board meetings around the Phoenix area, on the hunt for controversies, particularly those involving transgender policies.
“It’s the top of the heap” among issues his group is concerned with, Kuentzler said.
Both Benson and Larrabee also attended the April 4 meeting at Catalina Foothills Unified District, as did at least three executive board members of the Pima County Republican Party.
The pair also have sent public records requests and emails to various districts seeking information to include in articles they say they are writing for School Board Watchlist, a website hosted by Turning Point USA.
The website has the stated mission of exposing “radical” school boards, according to its website. Arizona has at least 35 districts listed on that website. Some district profiles contain original stories about policies or practices. Some list links to media stories about controversies. Some simply list the district and its board members.
Related: ASU President Michael Crow asked Turning Point USA to take faculty off 'watchlist'
The head of Liberty Elementary’s school board, Michael Todd, tried to stop his district from placement on the watchlist, threatening to resign in frustration over its inclusion.
Todd said he tried to explain to Benson that he and other newly elected conservatives were working to steer the board in a direction he thought Turning Point might appreciate. But, he said, that Benson was focused on Bixler’s gender identity.
“People get tunnel vision on one issue,” Todd said.
Bixler, in an interview ahead of a Liberty study session, said the attacks against her were motivated by fear. “I don’t think I’m a threat,” Bixler said.
The aim, she said, was “to sadly infuriate and inflame, only for political gain.”
What’s happened to stir Arizona controversy?
The furor in some districts started from real, if isolated, incidents.
In Catalina Foothills, a principal sent an email to staff in 2021 that listed students who wanted to go by different names or pronouns. The email, which came to light in March, said some students didn’t want their parents to know. The district said the email violated its policy.
That email was the impetus for Dan Grossenbach to start a parent's group to monitor Catalina Foothills and other southern Arizona school districts. He was the activist who said he knew of examples where males pretended to be transgender to gain access to a girls’ restroom or locker room.
He also said that whether such a case actually existed didn’t matter.
“Are you saying that, if there are no (or very few) reported cases of a certain behavior X, that X should not be a concern to anyone?” he wrote in an email.
In Peoria Unified, a female transgender student who used the girls’ room made some students uncomfortable.
Nikki Eancheff, whose daughter was a high school senior, said the principal told her the student was reprimanded for loitering in the bathroom. Eancheff alerted the district to videos the student posted from inside the bathroom and social media posts that suggested a mental crisis. Within a week of that, she said, the student was no longer on campus.
And Liberty Elementary voters elected Bixler, the first transgender elected official in Arizona. Some parents wondered how children would react to her presence when she attended school events in her capacity as a board member.
But during public comments at school board meetings, the concerns went beyond the actual and spiraled into perceived fears.
What else is the school keeping from parents? Can anyone just decide one day they wish to use the other bathroom?
Eancheff said even though the student had left the Peoria high school, she kept pushing for a policy to prevent any further incidents from happening.
Many parents at school board meetings have brought up a student accused of sexual assault in Loudoun County, Virginia. The incident occurred in the girls’ bathroom and the male student, who was convicted as a juvenile as a result, was wearing a skirt.
Both the mother of the boy and the father of the victim told the New York Times that the male student was not transgender. A school official told the Times he understood the student wore a skirt because he was a drama student who was experimenting with different looks.
A Virginia report on the matter also said a policy allowing transgender students to use the bathroom aligning with their identity had passed the board but was not yet enacted. It did not factor into the assault, the report said. School officials did send emails to each other fretting the policy might get blamed.
The Virginia report said that the boy and the girl had used the girls’ room as a spot for previous consensual sexual encounters. On the day of the assault, the girl did not consent, the report said.
At the school board meeting for the Catalina Foothills district, Benson referenced the Loudoun County incident and wondered why it wasn’t enough to justify a restrictive bathroom policy.
Benson suggested parents either work to replace the board or remove their children from the district to bankrupt it.
'It’s really easy to dehumanize people’
That meeting triggered a response from the Catalina Foothills community. Students, parents and community members who heard or saw the comments from the April 4 meeting showed up en masse the following week to show support for transgender youth.
More than two dozen people addressed the board in support of allowing students to use the bathroom that aligned with their gender.
Among them was Sage Wexler, a 15-year-old on the cheerleading squad at Catalina Foothills High School. She would seem to be the type of student whom anti-transgender activists felt they were trying to protect. Wexler told the board the issue was overblown.
In an October interview with The Republic, Wexler said most students don’t use the showers in the locker room. They change clothes, but don’t strip down after physical education class or, in her case, after cheer practice. Maybe you perspire a bit, she said, “but not enough to shower.”
She said coaches have offices near the entrance and would likely stop anyone from entering who didn’t belong. And, she said, everyone in the locker room would band together and help any student who was threatened with attack.
“The fear hasn’t really been thought through,” she said.
Daniel Trujillo, 16, who attends high school in the Catalina Foothills district, helped coordinate the show of support for transgender students like himself.
Daniel is an activist for transgender rights and earlier this year helped organize a prom for transgender students on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
But he said his gender identity is only a small part of who he is. He said if he were to liken it to a map of the United States, his gender identity is akin to Rhode Island. His love of the band Radiohead is the size of Texas.
The focus on what bathroom he uses has the effect, he said, of reducing him to a collection of body parts.
“You don’t have to see me as a sophomore who likes to hang out with his friends, who plays the guitar,” he said. “It’s really easy to dehumanize people when you don’t have to focus on who they are as a human.”
His mother, Lizette Trujillo, said much of the fear is about transgender girls using the girls’ bathroom. But, she said, if the policies asked for by conservatives and some Republican lawmakers were enacted, it would mean Daniel would no longer use the boys’ room.
“They would just see a boy going into the girls’ bathroom,” she said.
Set up 3rd bathroom? It’s not that simple
Tom Horne, the superintendent of public instruction and a former attorney general, proposed what he said was a simple solution. He proposed schools “set up a third bathroom,” he said. “I think they’d like a place where they can go and not be harassed.”
Horne said that when he raises this solution in speeches, he always gets a positive reaction.
It is also a solution that has been floated by concerned citizens in various board meetings.
It is not clear how federal courts would react, though.
Judges have ruled that the federal non-discrimination law known as Title IX applies to transgender individuals. Courts, including a 2020 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that governs Arizona, have upheld the rights of transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
Courts have said schools can put up privacy screens in locker rooms if they are available for anyone to use. Schools can’t force transgender students to use them, however.
Schools could make alternate bathrooms available for anyone who wants to use them, courts have said. But, again, they can’t force transgender students to use them.
Rohrs, the conservative Chandler board member, said while he aligns with parents’ concerns on the bathroom issue, he would not ask the board to enact a policy because it would violate federal law.
Although Benson, the Turning Point USA representative, had pushed for such a policy in Peoria, she did not do so when she spoke to the Chandler board.
At a Peoria school board meeting, an attorney for the district gave a review of the Title IX case law in public to explain why the district could not change its bathroom policy.
It was that presentation, and subsequent meetings with Peoria board members and the superintendent, that helped Peoria resident Laura Tepezon understand the issue more fully.
Tepezon spoke to the board in March, reading a letter she said represented female students who noticed what appeared to them to be a person with a beard lingering in the girls’ room. That person was the student later removed from campus after a parent alerted the school to videos posted on social media.
In subsequent meetings with district officials, Tepezon said she learned there was a procedure for students questioning their gender identity. It involved a meeting with parents and school officials and deciding on an accommodation. That knowledge lessened her fear that anyone could declare themselves the opposite gender and use that bathroom.
“To make the statement that (Peoria Unified) allows boys in the girls’ bathrooms, I would not say that,” she said.
Tepezon faulted the board for not explaining the issue in a way that made parents understand it. However, she also said some people might not be willing to take the time to fully understand it.
Some people, she said, want to foster division rather than find a solution. “Maybe the division helps for next year’s election,” she said.
2024 election cycle could revive furor over transgender students
According to The Republic’s analysis of school board meetings around the state, the discussion around transgender students has lessened.
The hourslong meetings featuring dozens of residents asking boards to adopt bathroom policies or other restrictive measures have ebbed.
Jackson, the president of the Catalina Foothills board, recalled that Grossenbach, the head of the group that aimed to monitor the Catalina Foothills school district, had vowed he would attend every meeting until a bathroom policy was placed on an agenda. He last spoke at a meeting in September.
He did not reply to an email in December asking for an update on his activities.
Jackson said that despite no policies changing, whatever perceived looming danger there was doesn’t appear to loom anymore.
“Their world and their view of the Catalina Foothills district, I don’t know where it comes from,” she said in a December phone interview. “Do I think they’re gone forever? No. I think they’re gearing up for next year’s election.”
Two seats will be open on the board, including that of Jackson, who is stepping aside. It also is a presidential election year.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, based in Arlington, Virginia, said he will encourage Republicans to press transgender issues during the 2024 election cycle.
Schilling’s group released a report on the 2022 elections titled “The Failed Red Wave” that said the prime reason for Republicans losing in the midterms was not talking enough about transgender access to bathrooms and locker rooms, and transgender females competing in girls’ sports.
It made sense, Schilling said in an interview, that groups like the Goldwater Institute and Heritage Foundation were expanding their scope of interest to include these issues. His own American Principles Project, he said, originally had an economic focus, including advocating pension reform.
“Voters care about what they care about,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t about the issue you care about.”
Still, he said, the mission is to win campaigns. “It’s all politics,” he said. “It’s all prudential judgment.”
Schilling said that while there was energy around these issues at school boards and state legislatures, parents will need to see policy changes.
“If they don’t do that, it will disperse,” he said. “It will die out and go away if there isn’t action taken.”
A Moms For Liberty event in September attracted political figures, including Horne, four state lawmakers, a sprinkling of school board members and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell.
This was months before one of the co-founders of the group, Bridget Ziegler, faced calls to resign her school board seat in the Sarasota, Florida, area after her husband was accused of sexual assault. Ziegler told investigators that she and her husband, who was the head of the Florida Republican Party, previously had a consensual sexual encounter with the woman making the accusation, according to a report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
The other two co-founders, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, who spoke at the August event in Arizona, issued a statement in December saying that Ziegler had not been involved with the group for some time.
On a panel at the September event in Mesa, one lawmaker, Sen. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, talked about parents needing to pressure cities to enact bathroom ordinances if school districts wouldn’t. Another lawmaker, Rep. Barbara Parker, R-Mesa, suggested that a cheerleading team had quit in unison after a male paraded around in their locker room. After the panel, Parker refused to say whether she was talking about a specific school in Arizona.
No such story about a cheerleading squad quitting has emerged in the months since.
Jodi Smith, a 40-year-old Mesa mother of three and self-described conservative, said she attended the event because she was keenly interested in education issues, both as a teacher and a professor at Arizona State University’s education college.
But, standing in the back of the auditorium, Smith said she thought that lawmakers were sensationalizing education issues. She said the politicians were trying to match the frustration parents felt about the “gender stuff.”
In her experience, the majority of educators just want to teach their students.
On stage, lawmakers said how teachers were Marxist and indoctrinating children. Someone suggested putting cameras in classrooms.
“I’m rolling my eyes at some of the things they’re saying,” Smith said.
Arizona Republic reporters Kunle Falayi, Andrew Ford and Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this article.
Reach Ruelas at 602-444-8473 or at richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com. Follow the reporter at @ruelaswritings on X, formerly known as Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Ariz. school boards hear misinformation in transgender bathroom debate
