ISSUES: Transgender Teen Stripped of Homecoming King Title

Oakleigh Reed was voted Homecoming King by his fellow classmates at Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Mich.—but he won't be wearing the crown. Administrators nullified the vote because Oak, born Oakleigh Marie Reed, is enrolled at the school as a female. The transgender teen, who plans to have a sex change operation at age 18, was called into the principal’s office and told that “they had to invalidate all of my votes,” he tells NBC. The ACLU may take up the case; a Facebook group called “Oak is my King” has more than 3,500 members.

“It's the senior class that votes for their representative. What they did was taking away the voice of the senior class,” Reed says, but the principal claims Reed may not actually have won the competition, because they stopped counting his votes when they realized an "ineligible" person was running. “In order to be eligible for homecoming king, the ballot clearly states you must be a boy,” she says. “He, as I use the pronoun correctly out of respect, is not a boy.”