"But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious."

"It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence. Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. 'The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,' [Buta] Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, 'He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.' The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone 'identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.'"

From "The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT).

I've avoided talking about this case until now — despite a lot of pushing from my commenters — and this is why. It was obvious to me that we did not have a good enough statement of the facts. People were making assumptions that nudged this case into serving as a great example of something they were worried about — that males would fake transgender status to victimize women and girls in bathrooms.