by Audrey Farris ‘25

In October, Twitter exploded over an article by The Daily Caller stating that MCPS saw a 528-percent increase in students struggling with gender identity over the past two years. The article was written based on information shared by an assistant principal at Quince Orchard High School via a photo on Twitter that showed that in 2019, 35 students indicated they identified as non-binary, and in 2021, 239 students. This data was collected from 423 intake forms that were given to students by their counselors when the students came to them stating that they were having issues with their gender identity. After

The Daily Caller article was shared among numerous online accounts, the Washington Examiner wrote an article titled “Forty-five percent of Montgomery County students identified as nonbinary in survey.”
News outlets are creating bait-y and blatantly false headlines that give the alt-right Twitter world more misinformation to support their discriminatory views. It was evident that many online commentators didn’t even read the Washington Examiner article, where the first paragraph states that 45 percent of 423 students with gender-identity conflict self-reported on intake forms as non-binary. That is very different from claiming that 45 percent of all MCPS students reported as non-binary.