The following blog post is by Family Council staff member Deborah Beuerman.
A lawmaker in Utah has proposed a bill that would prevent transgender students in public schools from using bathroom facilities of their choice.
The lawmaker says his plan would protect Utah schools from being forced to allow transgendered students to choose between girls’ or boys’ restrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams depending on the gender they identify themselves as having. The proposal would require schools to provide additional bathrooms for transgendered students.
A California law to allow school students to choose restrooms according to the gender they identify with took effect on January 1. There is a proposed referendum to overturn the law.
A Colorado antidiscrimination law has been applied to transgendered students and their use of school restrooms, as well.
The Maine Supreme Court has just declared that a school violated the rights of a fifth-grade transgendered student when they told him that he had to stop using the girls’ bathroom. The school had offered the use of a staff restroom to the student.
The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) is working to overturn both the California and Colorado laws, and has argued the “rights” of the male students are infringing on the rights of female students. A staff attorney for PJI has said, “the Maine decision is emblematic of the alarming lengths to which transgender activists will go to enforce their radical gender notions on the rest of society. Although the Maine decision will not bind any courts or jurisdictions outside of Maine, it is likely to embolden other activist judges across the country to issue copycat decisions.”
He noted that “many school districts have been navigating these difficult issues with sensitivity toward the needs of all students, for example by providing third restroom or changing alternatives for students with gender identity issues,” but criticized “the insatiable and unreasonable transgender lobby” for ignoring “reasonable accommodations,” and said proponents of ignoring biology in schools are “pretending that anatomy and biology don’t matter.”
Isn’t it sad we have to talk about laws governing which restroom a person may use? It should still be considered indecency for biological boys and biological girls to share a school bathroom. Critics of the proposed Utah measure say it violates civil liberties of transgender students and points them out as different. Well, boys and girls are different. And what about the civil liberties of the other students in the school?
Allowing people to use any bathroom regardless of their biological gender has a number of unintended consequences, as we have written before. It gives sexual predators an excuse to loiter in or around opposite-sex bathrooms, and it affects the security and privacy of others using that bathroom. As one California group wrote of its state “bathroom law,”
“The law ignores the security and privacy concerns of students while they are in the most vulnerable areas of a school – showers, restrooms and locker rooms. … Imagine your daughter or granddaughter having to share a shower with a male student. All the male student has to do is claim a female gender identity, and [this law] gives him the absolute right to shower with female students!”
Proposals like this one in Utah should not be controversial. They’re just common sense.
Gwen