Trans Students

The skirmishes continues as school districts around the country thumb their noses at Title IX.

The latest battleground in transgender rights: the school changing room
The Economist
By V.V.B
Oct 30th 2015

A DISAGREEMENT about the treatment of transgender students is pitting the largest high-school district in Illinois against federal authorities. The bone of contention is the access to changing rooms for a transgender high-school student in one of the five high schools and two alternative schools of Township High School District 211 in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. The student, who was born male but identifies as female, lived for several years as a girl and plays on the girls' sports team, demands that she is given full access to the girls' locker room.

Daniel Cates, the superintendent of district 211, denies her full access to that and instead offers her a separate room or the male locker room to change in. He argues that he has to balance the privacy rights of 12,500 students and the rights of a group with particular needs. In his view, the privacy of that vast majority of students is infringed if transgender students are allowed to change in the same locker room as the students of the gender they identify with.
[…]
Meanwhile, hundreds of school districts are following the Department of Education’s rules without it causing them much trouble. A few objected to the rules and ran into trouble. On October 28th the Obama administration filed a legal brief in a federal appeals court backing a transgender student’s challenge of his school’s policy banning him from using the bathroom that corresponds with the gender he identifies with. Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male, sued his school in rural Virginia over a policy requiring him to use the girls’ restroom or a single-stall unisex bathroom. Some of his class mates and their parents reportedly argued that his presence in the boys’ bathroom would be disruptive and violate the male students’ privacy.

Segregation is never right, we learned long time ago that “separate but equal” is wrong, forcing a trans student to use a special bathroom stigmatizes the student and causes bullying and harassment; it marks them “different.”

And as the article points out hundreds of school districts around the have integrated their school districts without trouble proving the fear moguls wrong.