Wednesday, March 29, 2017

This Is Something That I Preach

When I was on Face the State Sunday morning talking heads show and the host kept on harping on bathrooms and locker rooms, I said everyone wants privacy and that should be the goal. The same is true for homelass shelters.
Better locker rooms: It’s not just a transgender thing
Sport Management professor George B. Cunningham and Gender Studies director Erin E. Buzuvis look at what can be done to make locker rooms safe – for transgender people and everyone else.
Pink News UK
By George B Cunningham and Erin E Buzuvis
28th March 2017

Most of these court cases also apply to student athlete access to locker rooms and question schools’ obligations to provide appropriate facilities as well as the rights transgender athletes have to access these facilities.

The result has been considerable debate over how to accommodate the needs of transgender athletes. As researchers who focus on diversity and inclusion in sport, we see significant changes in the ways trans athletes are treated and believe there are pragmatic solutions available that will serve all athletes.
[…]
To illustrate, consider the case of a high school in Palatine, Illinois. There, a transgender female athlete was permitted to play on girls’ teams, but she was excluded from the girls’ locker room. The locker room contained private changing areas that the student intended to use. Nevertheless, she was forced to use a private changing area located in another part of the building. The Department of Education found this exclusion to violate the student’s civil rights and eventually reached an agreement with the school district that now permits the student to access the girls’ locker room.
More and more schools are going to single changing stalls.
Privacy, on the other hand, is a relevant consideration, but not a reason to exclude transgender athletes from gender-appropriate locker rooms. Rather, privacy is a concern for many students faced with the prospect of communal showers and large undifferentiated changing areas. It would seem that most individuals – irrespective of their gender identity and expression – don’t want to change in the open or bathe in gang showers.
BINGO!

Back when I was in college in the dark ages of 1970s the college that I attended had individual changing stalls. Each stall had a bench, a locker and a shower. If they could do it back then, then why don’t they do it now?



This afternoon I am on a panel at a local law school discussing non-binary gender at their “Breaking the Binary”

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