A Tale Of Two Cities

One place is open and accepting and the other place is bigoted and rejecting.

Oconomowoc School District adopts 'gender-neutral' restroom policy
Wisconsin Gazette
Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Sep 13, 2013
Oconomowoc School District Superintendent Rodger Rindo announced last week that unisex bathrooms would be installed at every school in the district.

The new policy was adopted in response to an incident involving a transgender elementary school student. Parents complained after the student used a girl’s restroom at Summit Elementary School on Sept. 6. Apparently, they believed she should have used the boy’s room.

In a press release, Rindo said converting one restroom at each school into a “gender-neutral” bathroom “will provide a facility which is safe and accessible to all students, not only to transgender students.”

“What’s really important is that we’re not singling anyone out – that anybody can use that bathroom,” Rindo told FOX6 Milwaukee.

Meanwhile south of the Mason-Dixon Line…

Transgender student denied access to bathroom, told to use storage closet
WTSP Ch10
12:05 AM, Aug 27, 2013

CLEARWATER, Florida - A Safety Harbor transgender nursing student says her Pinellas vocational school isn't allowing her to use the women's restroom.
[…]
Wilson, who's transgender, was born a boy but since she was 12 she said she's identified with being female. She's currently undergoing gender transition right now. She mentioned that to some of her fellow classmates recently, and a month later she said she was called into the office.

"Basically told that I can't use the women's restroom and I can't use the men's restroom- and the only restroom I was given access to at that time was a storage room that did not lock from the inside," Wilson explained.

In an article in RH Reality Check they reported,

The current educational rights landscape for transgender and gender non-conforming students is uneven. While victories are coming out of California and Colorado, where transgender 6-year-old Coy Mathis won the right to use the girls’ bathroom, other states are working to dismantle or at the very least curb lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. From Tennessee’s botched “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would’ve banned primary and secondary school faculty from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity/expression to the choice by Pennsylvania’s Red Lion Area School District not to read transgender student Issak Wolfe’s assumed name at graduation (not to mention listing him as a prom queen, instead of a king, candidate), transgender students are facing more roadblocks in guaranteeing equal representation and protection.

Even in Connecticut where we have a gender inclusive non-discrimination law and the Commission of Human Rights and Opportunities said in their Guidelines for Schools on Gender Identity and Expression that, 

Students should have access to the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity asserted at school. Schools may maintain separate restroom facilities for male and female students provided that they allow students to access them based on their gender identity and not exclusively based on student’s assigned birth sex.

Never the less, school systems in the state still refuse to allow trans-student to use the bathroom of their gender identity. They claim that the law does not specifically say that they have to allow trans-students to use the bathroom of their gender identity. Which is true, however, there were numerous amendments to the proposed bill to limit bathroom use to a person’s birth gender. The amendments were proposed in committee, in the House and in the Senate and they were all defeated.

Why does it take legal action to make them do the right thing?