On Monday, the teenage victim of the Stone Bridge assault testified that she and her attacker had agreed to meet up in a school bathroom around 12:15 p.m. on the date of the assault. She testified they had not explicitly discussed having sex beforehand.
The teen testified she arrived first and chose to go in the girls' bathroom because the two had always met in the girls' bathrooms in the past. When the boy arrived, the teen testified, he came into the handicapped stall she was in and locked the door...
The attacker was convicted of what certainly sounds like vicious and violent behavior. But he did not target a random student, and he did not choose the girls bathroom because of his gender identity.
"Obviously, the fact that the girl had previously had consensual sex with the male teenager does
not mean that the May 28 incident was not a rape or that it should be treated more leniently,"
wrote Cathy Young in a piece for
Arc Digital. "But it does mean, at the very least, that the boy did not ambush a random girl after using his supposed 'genderfluid' status to enter the bathroom; he and the victim had been using it for prior sexual encounters."
The Daily Wire's reporting also gave readers the strong impression that the school was initially reluctant to involve law enforcement in the matter; journalist Jesse Singal obtained police dispatch logs that
"strongly dispute" this notion.
None of this means that the matter was handled perfectly by school, police, or district officials—or that Smith's fury was unjustified. But it
does mean that conservatives shouldn't hold up the Loudoun County sexual assault as a cautionary tale about the supposed dangers of letting trans students use women's bathrooms. If anything, it's a cautionary tale about credulously assuming the worst when it would be maximally politically convenient to do so.