A guy who is either a local pastor, as his social media profiles claim, or isn’t, as some online commentators are claiming, is trying to rally local MAGAs to pack next week’s Waynesboro School Board meeting over bathroom issues.
“We need to show out in force at the upcoming school board meeting on Tuesday May 12th,” the pastor/not pastor, Terrance Williams, wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
“They have been allowing males in female bathrooms and locker rooms and they need to hear some voices of resistance,” Williams wrote.
Incidentally: this guy’s Facebook profile identifies him as:
“Child of God, Husband, Father, Minister, Truth seeker and speaker, Committed to the Body of Christ.”
Also: his LinkedIn profile IDs him as the “senior pastor” at Reality Church in Waynesboro.
Not sure why, but there are folks claiming to be Williams allies who are disputing the characterization about him being a “local pastor” made in the article that we wrote on Williams and his anti-trans crusade on Wednesday.
ICYMI
Like we made that up about him or something.
We can’t help that we’re referring to him the way he refers to himself.
Moving on.
The post from Williams serving as the call to action didn’t cite a source for the “allowing males in female bathrooms and locker rooms” assertion, which is, unfortunately, par for the course in terms of discourse from folks on that side.
We can maybe assume that Williams was watching Fox News or a video on Twitter that reinforced that particular bigoted viewpoint.
Missing from the endless blathering from the far, far right about trans kids is any sense of scale.
I’ll try to provide that here.
The numbers
A 2023 CDC report tells us that 3.3 percent of high school students nationwide identify as trans.
Worth noting: that’s the number who ID as trans, not the number actually transitioning, and with the MAGAs making it harder, borderline impossible, for kids who want to begin the arduous process involved in a gender transition, we can assume that the number of teens that any of the rest of us would outwardly identify as trans is much smaller than that 3.3 percent.
In any case.
Let’s say 3.3 percent is a good number.
Waynesboro High School has in the area of 930 kids in grades 9-12 enrolled this year.
What is 3.3 percent of 930?
Thirty-one.
Now, to the surprise stat portion of our report:
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a 4,000-member organization of medical, legal, academic and other professionals.
Translation: roughly two-thirds of teens who ID as trans are assigned female at birth.
That is, girls, who ID as boys.
This, of course, runs counter to the story that the anti-trans population likes to tell, about the overrunning of girls bathrooms and locker rooms by boys who pretend to be trans so that they can sneak a peek.
Back to Waynesboro High School: if the numbers hold, and two-thirds of our 31 kids who identify as trans are assigned as female at birth, that leaves us with 10 who are assigned male at birth.
To the question of how many of those 10 are actually undergoing the process of transitioning, we’re really getting into the weeds now.
Reality check
Whatever Terrance Williams’ status is at Reality Church, here’s a dose of hard reality: not one of those 10 kids is ID’g as trans because they want to get into the girls bathroom or girls locker room for a free look.
Seems to me that people who think that are projecting their perverted thoughts and feelings onto others to be able to think that.
Another story for another day, that one.
Reality is, trans kids are bullied by their peers – 49 percent reported being victims of bullying, per a 2024 report from The Trevor Project – and by society at large.
Here’s the sad number: the Trevor Project study found that 90 percent of trans teens said their well-being was negatively impacted due to politics.
That’s what is about to be done next week with the righteous crusade that is being organized.
Forty-six percent of trans teens said they’d considered suicide in the past year; 12 percent said they’d attempted suicide in the past year.
Let’s run some numbers for WHS based on the data: this little witch hunt that a guy who either is or isn’t a local pastor is trying to whip up is going to add to the anguish for five WHS students who are already thinking of suicide, and it might be the breaking point for one to actually try it.
I couldn’t sleep at night, if I thought I was pushing a kid to want to kill themselves.
I’m somehow the bad guy here, for pointing all of this out, of course.
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Chris Graham
