Coming soon to a girls’ locker room in a high school near you: the Obama administration’s transgender gendarmes.
In the first action of this sort, President Obama’s Department of Education steamrolled a suburban Chicago high school district into giving a student, a biological male who now identifies as a female, access to the girls’ locker room.
Township High School District 211 had fought valiantly to protect the privacy rights of the girls using the locker room. But it gave up the fight after the education department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) threatened to withhold $6 million in federal aid.
This was no small fish that OCR was trying to land. District 211 is Illinois’s largest high school district, serving 12,500 students in seven schools from 11 thriving suburbs several miles northwest of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Having now established a precedent for clubbing schools into accepting the arch-progressive definition of gender, the OCR may be emboldened to visit your school if it sniffs the slightest existence of “transphobia” of the kind it supposedly unearthed in District 211.
The school originally, in an effort at a “common sense” and compassionate solution, had provided separate changing facilities for Student A for athletic activities and gym class. Based, one would suppose, on the startling assumption—to transgender activists—that adolescent girls have a right of privacy when dressing, undressing, and showering.
The OCR and the American Civil Liberties Union, representing Student A, at first resolutely demanded full and unrestricted access to the locker room, arguing that anything less violates Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Never mind that this was a new and novel interpretation of the federal ban on sex discrimination in public schools.
After weeks of negotiation, a “compromise” was reached. The OCR, in its beneficence, would permit the school to install “curtains” in the locker rooms, giving Student A and other students—if they so desire—a place to shelter from prying eyes while changing and showering. How this will accommodate scores of girls trying to use the locker room all at once bewilders.
As part of the agreement, the OCR imposed a series of costly and intrusive conditions on the school, including a deluge of paperwork, strict federal monitoring, the hiring of an expert on “transgender and gender nonconforming youth,” and the creation at the student’s request, of a “support team,” that would include her parents.
Hundreds of parents showed up December 2 at a long, emotional, and heated public hearing to rail against giving a male transgendered student access to a girls’ locker room under any circumstances. The board nonetheless proceeded to approve the agreement.
Then just hours later came an unexpected hitch: Catherine E. Lhamon, OCR’s boss, disavowed the agreement. In an appalling display of incompetence or bad faith, she told the media that the agreement applied to all students in all district schools, not just Student A in one school—a mystifying misreading of the clearly written agreement. School superintendent Daniel Cates’s immediate response was blunt: “We are outraged by [Lhamon’s] mischaracterization . . . and her blatant disregard for the facts of the negotiated agreement. . . . It is wrong, it is an act of bad faith, and our school district will not let it stand.”
When the board scheduled an emergency session to rescind the agreement, Lhamon, properly chastised, issued a one-paragraph retraction of her high-handed interpretation: The school’s reading was the correct one.
Still, the board went ahead with its emergency meeting on December 7. Fully alerted, transgender activists loaded up the allotted two-hour public comment time with nonresidents. What followed were unending personal condemnations, accusing board members, students, and parents of assorted phobias and hatreds.
The board ultimately declined to rescind the agreement, leaving the curtain solution in place. Republican state representative Tom Morrison called it a terrible mistake. The district would have won a court challenge, he said, because federal case law backs its original no-access policy. Indeed, research by the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Thomas More Society cites several federal court decisions affirming that schools are not legally required to allow students to use opposite-sex restrooms, showers, and changing rooms. Furthermore, granting students access to opposite-sex changing areas could subject schools to tort liability for violating parents’ rights.
Whether the District 211 Parents for Privacy, a group actively opposed to any access, will followup with a lawsuit is not yet clear. Morrison plans to introduce legislation requiring Illinois school districts to ban the use of opposite-sex locker rooms by students claiming to be transgender.
But across the country, some school districts, anticipating the OCR’s approach or of their own volition, already are opening up opposite-sex locker rooms to trans students, sometimes with little or no public notice. Transgender activists are increasingly confident they’ll win this latest cultural battle.
Significantly and sadly, the progressives at the public hearings never acknowledged the central issue: the other girls’ right to privacy. It’s as if the left were conducting a war on adolescent women.
A few classmates of Student A rose at the last public hearing to challenge the settlement, emotionally, courageously, and eloquently. In sum, they said: We, too, have been bullied for our views. We know Student A and she’s a friend. We have never bullied her and we respect her own brave fight for what she believes are her rights. But, please, also consider our privacy rights. We’re concerned about our modesty. Seeing the male genitalia isn’t our problem. We are self-conscious of our bodies; this is a difficult time for us.
They were rewarded with shouts of approval and a standing ovation.
These girls are minors, children really. Their right to privacy is being offered up in sacrifice for a grand social experiment. Has it come to this, that even children must now be subjected to this rigid ideology, without their or their parents’ assent?
One angry father told the board that he would never, ever let his daughter use an open washroom unless every girl and her parents signed waivers stating they wouldn’t mind the presence of a boy in it.
Strong words. In Township High School District 211, the fight appears not to be over.
Dennis Byrne is a Chicago writer.
