Anti-LGBTQ+ trolls mad as trans student wins popularity contest and is crowned homecoming queen
A transgender nine-year-old is suing the state of North Carolina. (Credit: Getty ImageS)
Butthurt anti-LGBTQ+ trolls are furious that a transgender high school student at a Missouri high school was elected homecoming queen by her peers.
Last week, student Tristan Young was named homecoming queen at Oak Park High School in Kansas City, reportedly beating out four other candidates for the title.
This is the second time since 2015 that the school has elected a transgender student as their homecoming queen – the first being Landon Patterson.
But what should have been a joyous occasion was unfortunately overshadowed by heated online discourse, after transphobes caught wind of Young’s win.
Far-right figures and groups like Riley Gaines and Libs of TikTok went ballistic when they learned of Young’s homecoming title and resorted to making some pretty horrible comments about the high school student. It’s all rather ironic when you remember that many of these figures display their transphobia under the guise of protecting children, but I digress.
Thankfully, for every ignorant, trivial comment about Young’s win, there were so many more positive responses, congratulating her.
Among them was Justice Horn, the LGBTQ Commission of Kansas City Chair, who shared his well wishes on X (aka Twitter).
“I want to pause and congratulate Tristan for being crowned Oak Park High School’s Homecoming Queen!” he wrote.
“I uplift this against the transphobic comments against this young person who was named queen by their peers. I’m thankful the next generation of Kansas City is so kind.”
Some bigots have used Young’s homecoming win to further the argument that transgender people should not be allowed to compete in contests that don’t align with the gender they were assigned at birth, since they would have a so-called unfair advantage.
But many were quick to point out that the only advantage Young could possibly have had in running for homecoming queen is that she was… well-liked by her peers.
The race for homecoming king and queen is essentially a popularity contest, in which students vote for their favourite candidate.
Did simply being transgender make Young popular enough among her fellow classmates to claim the homecoming crown? It sounds like that’s what transphobes think. All this time, have they just been intimidated by how cool, smart, and talented the transgender community is?
“Trans women have a biological advantage in being popular with their high school classmates now,” writer Ari Drennen joked, as news of Young’s homecoming win went viral online.
A second X user pointed out: “It’s not even a sport with specific metrics, it’s literally just a democratic vote. And in the grand scheme of things, it affects NOTHING!”
And a third teased: “So apparently at this point, we have inherent advantages in: sports, chess, video games, being attractive, being popular. Man, they think we’re even cooler than we do.”
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