Brooklyn High School Accused of Letting Trans Student Get Bullied and Beat Up, Lawsuit Says

Okay so I’ve been sitting on this story for like two hours because every time I try to write about it I just get mad all over again and have to step away. A 15-year-old trans girl in Brooklyn (her name is being kept private so the court documents just call her M.B.) was getting bullied and threatened for MONTHS and the school apparently just… let it happen? And then she got physically attacked outside the school and now her family is suing which, yeah, obviously.

I need to walk through the whole timeline because the details make it so much worse somehow. Like every time you think “okay that’s bad” it gets worse.

So according to Newsweek and the actual lawsuit, this all started back in November when a classmate (Damara Graham) added M.B. to a Snapchat group where kids were using fake names and just. Being awful. The complaint says they subjected her to “ridicule, taunts, and cruel mockery” which is lawyer-speak but you get the picture.

Then ten days later – and this is where I started yelling at my laptop (sorry to my roommate) – it escalated. They sent her messages calling her slurs (I’m not going to repeat them but use your imagination, the transphobic ones), telling her they were going to burn the pride flag, calling her “waste of sperm.” Dios mio. She’s FIFTEEN.

And THEN – because apparently that wasn’t enough – someone called “King” (who turns out to be Graham’s cousin) sent a message that said: “U not pressing my cousin I’ll come to that school pls don’t play with me.”

That’s. That’s a threat. A written, documented, screenshot-able threat of violence. In a group chat. With witnesses.

She reported it and the school did… something? Kind of?

M.B. reported the harassment the next day (good for her honestly, a lot of kids wouldn’t) and showed a teacher the Snapchat messages. The teacher was supposed to report it to the guidance counselor.

So what did the guidance counselor do? Did she call M.B.’s mom? No. Did she contact the authorities about the explicit threat of physical violence? Also no. What she DID do (and I cannot stress enough how badly this was handled) was pull BOTH M.B. AND HER BULLY out of gym class – in front of everyone – and make them have a “sit down” where the bully basically just apologized and that was supposed to fix everything??

The lawsuit says the counselor “failed and refused to contact the authorities” which. Yeah. That tracks.

I just. Who trained these people. (Nobody apparently, that’s the problem, schools get like zero actual training on how to handle this stuff and it shows.) (Sorry that was a tangent but it’s relevant I promise.)

And then January 18th happened

So “King” actually showed up to the school and beat her up. Like actually physically assaulted her. Outside the school, on camera (other students recorded it because of course they did), punching and slapping her after throwing her to the ground while other kids stood around CHEERING.

The lawyer representing M.B.’s family (David H. Rosenberg) told Newsweek that “This vicious physical attack on a 15-year-old child would have been prevented had the Department of Education notified my client that her transgendered daughter was being bullied at school on account of gender identity.”

Which is just. He’s right? Like if someone had just called this girl’s MOM when the death threats started happening maybe she could have done something? Transferred schools or filed a police report or ANYTHING other than letting her daughter walk into a situation where someone who had literally threatened to hurt her was able to actually hurt her??

NYC’s official response is predictably useless

The Department of Education put out a statement saying “Bullying and harassment have absolutely no place in our school communities” and that they’re “reviewing the complaint.”

Cool. Cool cool cool. That’s definitely helpful to the kid who already got beat up because you didn’t do your job the first time.

Rosenberg (the lawyer) said something that’s been stuck in my head all day: “There’s a lot of transphobia you wouldn’t think is right in New York City, we’re in such a liberal city to be in, they say, but unfortunately, we still have a lot of transphobia especially in the Department of Education.”

And like. He’s not wrong? We have this idea that major cities are somehow immune to this stuff but that’s not. That’s not how any of this works. Trans kids are getting harassed everywhere and the systems that are supposed to protect them keep failing over and over.

I don’t really have a neat ending for this one. The lawsuit is ongoing. M.B. is presumably trying to get through high school while also dealing with the trauma of being assaulted and also being failed by literally every adult who was supposed to help her. And I’m going to go take a walk or something because I’ve been clenching my jaw for the past hour and that’s probably not healthy.

If you’re a trans kid reading this (or the parent of one), document everything. Screenshots. Emails. Dates and times. Because apparently that’s what it takes and even then sometimes it’s not enough.