As if coming out as gay isn't hard enough when you're at school – especially, we imagine when that school is in notoriously-conservative Texas – one girl has been through a horrendous experience. Being outed to her mum by her teachers.
Skye Wyatt was just 16, when she claims two of her sports coaches confronted her in a locker room and told her they believed she was a lesbian in a relationship with another girl. She was, but she denied it (which seems fair enough given that it's not exactly something you'd want to tell your teachers in that kind of environment). At which point she says the coaches responded by threatening to sue her for slander and phoning her mother. Skye’s mum Barbara Wyatt arrived 40 minutes later and the coaches told her that her daughter was a lesbian.
Skye hadn't chosen to tell her mum about her sexual orientation (and why should she have to?) so obviously the outing was hurtful. So hurtful in fact that Skye decided to take action: and file a lawsuit saying that the coaches’ actions were in violation of her right to privacy under the US Constitution, the Texas constitution and Texas common law.
That was five years ago – and this week she's finally got some kind of resolution. The school district in Texas has just agreed to pay $77,500 (around £46k) to settle the federal lawsuit she'd brought against her teachers. As well as paying out, school administrators have agreed to conduct an annual training session for employees on privacy and discrimination as part of the settlement. The school also plans to publish an anti-discrimination policy in employee and parent-student handbooks and on their own website.
'The great thing that Skye did in bringing this lawsuit was that it was not just for her, it was for others,' Jennifer Doan, Skye’s attorney, told the Longview News- Journal.
As for the school itself? Well Kilgore administrators have given a statement saying the ‘Kilgore ISD board believes that the actions of its employees were in all things lawful’ and that ‘the settlement is much less expensive than what the insurance carrier would spend in this case in attorney fees and costs through trial, appeal by the plaintiff to the Fifth Circuit and appeal by the plaintiff to the United States Supreme Court’. Which is about the furthest away from an apology as it’s possible to get.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.