I’m thinking about the story I wrote the other day about a trans kid in a Texas school who got punished this year for having long hair. The district’s antiquated dress code set hair length requirements for boys and insisted that this trans child was a boy must must follow the rules.

Only problem was, they hadn’t enforced the code in at least 5 years and plenty of boys in the district also had long hair.

No problem, the district punished the fuck out of those kids too, including one 9-year-old boy with a great school record who they actually forced into a school for discipline problems and was then driven out of school entirely.

Authoritarian bigots will wear jack boots.

A federal judge came down hard and made district administrators stop punishing kids for hairstyles, but of course he can’t undo the harm that was done to the kids.

Who cares if the trans kid in this story was born any particular way or not? Who cares how the 9-year-old was born? He happens to be of Mexican heritage and long hair and ponytails happen to be ordinary and customary in his culture.

Both the trans kid and the Mexican-American boy have human rights and get to live their lives free from oppression and bigotry. Or at least they should.

But that’s not good enough for the transphobes, who just can’t stop being assholes. And if they’re racist assholes at the same time, I guess that’s just a bonus.