A transgender teenager has spoken out about the “living hell” she endures at her Florida middle school after she was attacked by other students.
Chad Sanford, a 13-year-old student at Deerfield Beach Middle School, told WPLG that she has been repeatedly attacked and bullied because of her LGBTQ identity.
Last month, video emerged showing Sanford being attacked while at school. In the video, filmed by a student, youths surround Sanford while a male student approaches from behind, picks Sanford up, and slams her into the ground.
The attack continues once Sanford is on the ground, with the students also yelling anti-gay slurs.
“He just stepped on my face, they were kicking and spitting on me and all that was a little clip of the video,” Sanford told WPLG. “They were screaming. They were saying, ‘We got that gay faggot.’”
Sanford said the attacks have taken place since last year and singled out the student who threw her to the ground, saying the youth one day “embarrassed me in front of everybody.”
“He stood on top of the stage and said to me, ‘I’m going to knock the gay out of him,'” Sanford claimed.
Sanford called the situation at the school “horrible” and said it has “been a living hell.”
“I didn’t even want to live anymore,” Sanford added, “because I felt like, ‘You’re not OK with my sexuality. Why should I be around for you to like me?’”
Sanford’s aunt, Raquel Showers, told WPLG that she has witnessed a change in Sanford since the bullying began, including that she had spoken about experiencing suicidal ideation because of the bullying.
“Hearing that, it just makes me cry,” Showers said.
Sanford told NBC News, “I just kept thinking, ‘Why should I be here? Why are you beating me up for being myself?’ He put me through hell.”
Broward County Public Schools told NBC Miami that it would investigate the incident, calling school safety their “highest priority” and saying Deerfield Beach’s leadership was “taking this incident seriously and is working with law enforcement in its investigation.”
“Any students involved will face appropriate school disciplinary consequences in accordance with the codebook for student conduct,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Tatiana Williams, the co-founder and executive director of Trans Inclusive Group, told NBC Miami that news of the attack took her back “to my own issues that I experienced when I was younger.”
“I think it’s important that we respect people the way we want to be respected, right?” she said. “It just goes back to human courtesy and human dignity, and making sure parents at home are teaching their kids what to do and what not to do.”
Police in West Hollywood are searching for a man who assaulted another while man yelling anti-gay slurs. He is also believed to have assaulted other individuals in the area.
The victim of the anti-gay assault, David Velasquez, told the WeHo Times that, on Sunday, March 17, he was coming back from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he had been treated earlier in the day for severe cold and flu symptoms.
He stopped by the Pavilions in WeHo to pick up medication and was riding his personal scooter home when the altercation occurred.
Velasquez noted that he was riding on the sidewalk to avoid being hit by potentially drunk drivers as he made his way through West Hollywood on a particularly raucous St. Patrick’s Day.
The mother of a 16-year-old boy says her son was stabbed and beaten by a group of teens during a vicious assault that was captured on video.
According to the victim's mother, Frankie, who has not given her last name to protect the family from potential harassment, the teen was assaulted by a gang of people during a bonfire party on February 10 at Dockweiler Beach in Playa Del Rey, just outside Los Angeles.
Frankie says her son -- whose name has not been released because he's a juvenile -- became involved in the altercation with his attackers after trying to help a friend.
A group of students, parents, and teachers in Florida have reached a settlement with state educational authorities that clarifies several provisions in the state's infamous "Don't Say Gay" law.
The "Don't Say Gay" law, officially dubbed the "Parental Rights in Education" law, sought to limit students' exposure to LGBTQ issues and identities under the guise of keeping parents informed and giving them outsized influence over what subjects are broached in the classroom.
Soon after its passage, proponents of the law quickly dubbed opponents "groomers," claiming they wanted to indoctrinate children into adopting values or embracing ideas that run counter to their parents' morals or beliefs or expose them to age-inappropriate subjects. Republican lawmakers soon expanded the law's restrictions on K-3 classrooms to apply to all K-12 classrooms in the state.
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