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In Arizona last week, a cisgender male 8th grader was “physically removed” from tryouts for his school’s boys’ basketball team because an error on his original birth certificate incorrectly identified him as being born female.
It’s the latest episode in a “gender ideology”-inspired nightmare for the teenager, Laker Jackson, and his family.
“I’m sad for everybody that it’s come down to this,” mom Becky Jackson told KNXV News in Phoenix.
The Kafkaesque drama was inspired by a clerical mistake 14 years ago, when hospital staff mistakenly identified Becky Jackson’s newborn son as a girl. It was an error Laker’s parents never noticed.
“I give him the birth certificate and they’re like, ‘Did you know this says female?’” Becky Jackson recalled about handing over enrollment paperwork to a school administrator last year.
“I was like, ‘What?’” Becky Jackson said. “I was like, ‘Oh man, that’s so funny.’ So we come home, everyone’s laughing.”
The busy mom of six said correcting the document wasn’t a priority.
“So we just put it in the drawer and moved on,” she said.
The mix-up didn’t cause issues until recently, she told AZ Family.
Last spring, school staff began treating Jackson as female, Becky Jackson said.
The district removed Laker Jackson from an all-boys gym class and mandated he use a separate restroom, despite the family’s assertion that their son is a cisgender boy, assigned male at birth.
Becky’s mom had already started work on changing Laker Jackson’s birth certificate, but “it’s not something that you can fix quickly. You have to have an affidavit signed,” she said.
In the meantime, the 14-year-old continued training to make the boys’ basketball team at his Mesa high school, a 7th to 12th-grade school in the Queen Creek Unified School District.
Becky Jackson said she received the corrected birth certificate over the summer and provided the district with the revised document, along with a doctor’s note confirming Laker’s sex.
But Queen Creek administrators said it wasn’t enough, standing by a rule stating that the school’s determination of a student’s sex would rely solely on an original birth certificate.
“They sent the athletic director of Eastmark High to physically remove Laker from the basketball tryouts in front of all of his friends, in front of the coach,” Becky Jackson said.
“I am a biological boy. I was born a boy,” said Laker Jackson, who heard from friends on the basketball team that “they were talking about it for the entire tryout and even the next day’s tryouts because they were really confused.”
After the family continued to raise objections to Laker Jackson’s treatment, a letter from an administrator said genetic testing to confirm their claim that the child is a boy “could be considered.”
“They may consider changing it if we get chromosomal testing. They didn’t say they would,” Laker’s mom said. She estimated the cost at $1500.
“So who’s going to pay that?” she asked.
In a statement, the district said it was “committed to ongoing dialogue.”
Becky Jackson also said her son will try out for a girls’ team if that’s what it comes to.
The ordeal is a prime example of what activists have long warned: that anti-trans policies are bad for everyone. It’s also quite ironic, considering the very people who want to stop anyone assigned male at birth from playing on girls’ sports teams may wind up forcing a cisgender boy to do just that.
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