SALT LAKE CITY — Al and Rachel van der Beek have a daughter who they say has been bullied by her peers for how she looks.
“She's a tomboy. She dresses how she dresses. She's got a vibe. She's super cool, cool style. And, and, you know, she cuts her hair, she works out a lot, hits the gym,” explained her dad, Al.
Al said it’s gotten worse since she started high school basketball.
“Playing, you know, sports in high school, just going to games and then afterwards she's in tears and we're like, ‘What's going on?’ he said. “She's like, ‘Oh, the student body, you know, just yelling out names and saying, ‘get the boy off the team’ and ‘he shouldn't be playing.’”
As bad as it sounds, the parents expected comments like these from teenagers, but never from an adult.
“So, we found out about Natalie Cline’s post yesterday morning around 10 o'clock and from there, everything just started snowballing,” said Rachel.
Utah State Board of Education member Natalie Cline took to Facebook Tuesday, posting a flyer for a girl’s basketball game that showed the van der Beek’s daughter. The caption said “Girl’s Basketball.” Many took it to mean Cline was implying the van der Beek’s daughter may be transgender, even though she is not.
“We were never prepared for an adult to put a picture up of our daughter and use it for their agenda in a political way to elicit hate and cyberbullying,” said Al.
Cline has since taken down the post on social media, expressing her ‘deepest apologies’ for the negative attention her post drew to innocent students and families and also stating she never claimed the student-athlete was a boy.
Rachel said they waited to tell their daughter about the widely circulated post after school.
“I never thought that was something I would need to protect her from,” she said. “To tell her that there were adults that were in a position to help protect kids that were making comments and making assumptions based strictly on appearance.”
Both the van der Beek's said they would like to see Cline resign from her position on the board.
“I just feel like let's stop it now before someone else gets hurt,” said Rachel.
They added that when it comes to how we treat our kids and one another, we need to be better.
“One thing that we feel very strongly about is giving kids a voice, you know, maybe people that don't fit in this exact box of what maybe the world or other people think someone should be,” said Rachel, “We wanna be a voice for those kids to just let them know that they're loved that we see them and that, you know, there's a lot of power in us all being individuals and being who we are.”
