A Canadian mom wants to press charges against a man who verbally attacked her 9-year-old daughter at a track-and-field event, angrily questioning the girl’s gender and calling her mothers “genital-mutilators” in an incident has drawn national attention and the condemnation of the premier of British Columbia.
Heidi Starr of Kelowna, about 80 miles north of Canada’s border with Washington, told USA TODAY on Tuesday that she was attending the school district-sponsored event along with her ex-wife and their daughter, whose name she didn’t want shared.
All the 4th-grade girls at Thursday’s event were taking turns at shotput when a grandfather in the crowd interrupted, standing in front of them and confronting one of the organizers, loudly saying: “This is a girl’s event. Why are you letting boys throw?”
“He pointed at my daughter and another girl with short hair and said, ‘Why are you letting boys throw?’” Starr said.
That’s when Starr pounced to defend her child, telling the man that her daughter is a girl.
“And he said, ‘Oh yeah, a girl,’ and he put finger quotes up in the air and said ‘a girl,’ and he looked at them and he said, ‘If they’re not boys, they’re trans,’” Starr said.
That’s when the man’s wife joined in, attacking Starr and her ex-wife, she said.
“His wife started screaming that my ex-wife and I were genital mutilators, pedophiles and groomers, and he demanded certificates confirming that my daughter was born female,” she said.
Starr continued to defend her daughter as other parents repeatedly shouted at the man to shut up and leave.
“He adamantly refused,” she said, adding that organizers eventually moved the shotput event but that the man followed everyone and stared them down until it was over.
Organizers then walked him, his wife and their granddaughter to their car to make sure he was gone before Starr and her family felt safe to leave, she said.
In the moment, Starr said she and the other parents were in…
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