Doctored girls water polo photo pushes anti-trans sentiment
- Published on March 21, 2024 at 16:33
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"Not dudes," says a March 18, 2024 post on X from "AlphaFox," an account that has previously spread disinformation, including about LGBTQ communities in the United States.
Similar posts sent the image spiraling across X and other platforms including Instagram, as well as onto far-right websites such as Gab and the fringe forum 4chan.
The posts come amid intense controversy over the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports, with lawsuits challenging collegiate policies and the US House of Representatives voting in 2023 to bar them from joining women's school and university teams.
The hot-button issue has crystallized around the case of swimmer Lia Thomas, who became the first transgender athlete to win a US national college title and initiated legal action in January to be allowed compete again in elite female competition, including the Paris Olympics.
But the picture purporting to show high schoolers taking a stance against transgender athletes by wearing bathing suits that say "Not a dude" is doctored.
The "RE" logo on the swimsuits corresponds to the girls water polo team for the Ransom Everglades School, a co-educational private school for grades six through 12 in the state of Florida.
Reached by AFP, the school said the image circulating online is a manipulated version of one taken by a photographer contracted by the school "several years ago."
"The photos circulating on social media are digitally altered images of high school students, at least one of whom was a minor at the time," the school told AFP in a March 20 statement.
"We are disgusted at the use of doctored images of school girls for political propaganda, and we know the young women depicted are distraught at the misuse of their images."
The school provided AFP with the original photo, which AFP is not publishing in full out of concern for the girls' safety and privacy.
The photo shows the swimsuits did not carry any political message.
Metadata attached to the digital file indicates a local sports photographer captured it on April 28, 2018 at Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida. That day, the Ransom Everglades School girls varsity water polo team took on Hialeah High School in the regional finals, according to the metadata, the team's schedule and local news reports. They lost 7-17.
Other publicly available photos of Ransom Everglades School's 2017-2018 squad show the athletes sporting the same swimsuits on the pool deck -- also without any text saying "Not a dude" (archived here).
AFP has previously debunked other altered images used to target the LGBTQ community, including here, here and here.
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