KANSAS CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) — Students at a Missouri high school have crowned a gender-confused male student “homecoming queen,” for the second time in the past decade.
Oak Park High School and the North Kansas City Schools district have taken to social media to celebrate the crowning of freshman Tristan Young for the high-school tradition. All the other contenders for the honor, pictured with the male victor, were actual girls.
Our queen. Happy HoCo! pic.twitter.com/adkJqENM2h
— Oak Park High School (@Northmen_OPHS) September 16, 2023
Congratulations to @Northmen_OPHS Homecoming Queen Tristan Young! 🥳👑 pic.twitter.com/5qP9DKEfPR
— NKC Schools (@NKCSchools) September 16, 2023
Young declared on Instagram that he was “forever thankful that you have chosen me to be your homecoming queen,” and has “had a very difficult high school journey, but having the support of my friends, family and oak park has helped tremendously, i truly don’t know where i would be without it.”
Young is the second male student at the school to win the female-specific title. The first was then-senior Landon Patterson in 2015.
Notably, the ability for the general public to reply was turned off on both X/Twitter posts, but many social media users, including All-American swimmer and fairness in women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines, took the opportunity to highlight and react to the story anyway, with multiple readers arguing that it was an example of the case for homeschooling:
So stunning & brave🤴🏻✨
Another reminder to all girls that men make the best women. I wonder if a female will win homecoming king or if it's understood that both of these spots are reserved for males. Who's to blame here? pic.twitter.com/ZXHU6Wyiiy
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) September 18, 2023
What kind of stupidity is this? This is a male. Four girls wanted to become the #Homecoming queen for their #highschool (@Northmen_OPHS), but #OakParkHighschool chose a boy. I wonder how the girls feel, being told a boy is better fit to be a queen than them. This is absurd. https://t.co/hAhuajkmUa pic.twitter.com/D6q4KNFCAw
— Misunderstood (@misunderwhat) September 19, 2023
This is child abuse… Not seeking treatment for a minor who is mentally ill is flat out child abuse this school should lose their funding.. https://t.co/BYBPHUXCgj
— Ainsley Hayes (@AinsleyHayes19) September 19, 2023
The fact that @NKCSchools immediately locked down comments is telling. They know this is nonsense pandering to the mentally ill. And the want everyone to play along. https://t.co/e9Dm5tpa70
— The Archie Accords (@ArchieAccords) September 17, 2023
Imagine being so proud that a guy wins homecoming Queen – so proud that you turn off comments. Imagine the heartbreak the other girls are having because they were just told “You are not enough” because a man has stolen yet another opportunity from them. So sad https://t.co/ujVrvKs3yn
— ✨✨Rainy ✨✨ (@NappyRainy) September 18, 2023
As is often the case with such stories, Christopher Wiggins of LGBT website The Advocate suggested that the real controversy was not denying female students an honor meant for them, but the fact that conservatives were objecting to the student body doing so. Wiggins went so far as to claim it was “deeply dehumanizing” to draw attention to the fact that Young both is and resembles a human male, rather than a human female.
The inculcation of gender fluidity and the rest of LGBT orthodoxy among the youth in public school has been a longstanding concern from school libraries to sports team and restroom policy to drag events to ideological classroom materials, to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input.
The issue, along with the promotion of ideological messages in taxpayer-funded education, has fueled a parent backlash that has been credited with Republican gains in states like Florida and Virginia, whose current respective governors have taken leading roles in fighting back.