It’s been a landmark year for LGBT rights with same-sex marriage legalization, but the battle for equality still rages on. The site of the battle is junior high school.
A suburban Chicago school was threatened with the loss of their Title IX funding by the Department of Education on Monday. The school has yet to resolve the dispute involving a transgender student who identifies as a female.
The student wanted to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without being restricted by the school’s administration.
With today’s societal norms, it’s commonplace for schools to address students by their preferred names along with their gender identity. Some schools permit transgender students to join the sports team that corresponds with their gender.
But when it comes to accepting transgender students in bathrooms and locker rooms, schools are less open to today’s liberal ideas.
While many schools accommodate transgender students through separate and private changing facilities, many transgender students and advocates aren’t happy with being told transgender students can’t use the facility that corresponds with their gender identities.
This “separate but equal” approach is akin to Jim Crow laws that segregated the South prior to 1965.
By offering transgender students designated facilities separate from their peers, schools are opening the door for discrimination. Encouraging today’s excessively judgemental youth to judge their peers even further shouldn’t be the answer to this problem.
But in reality, what other plausible solution is available to schools across the country as they address this issue?
At 13-years-old, the average American teen isn’t comfortable with their own body, much less a body of the opposite gender. At 20-years-old, I’m not even comfortable with my own body.
From this viewpoint, it’s difficult to ask children to accept others whose bodies are of the opposite gender when they likely haven’t even accepted their own bodies yet.
Students shouldn’t have the right to disregard a classmate’s gender identity, but they should have the right to be comfortable in already intimate settings like locker rooms and bathrooms.
Should a child be forced to accept changing with a student who is biologically different than them?
I’m not suggesting children are in danger of being abused if transgender students share the same facilities. That’s a transphobic myth pushed by the right wing agenda.
In Los Angeles, where transgender students use bathrooms and locker rooms with their gender identities since 2004, there are few issues or complaints.
This argument is void.
There is, however, the issue of expecting children to fully understand something as complex as gender identity at a young age. While children are given the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, adults are not.
Houston voters struck down a proposal on Tuesday that would have granted protections against nondiscrimination for various minorities, which included gay and transgender residents as one of the 15 protected groups.
The primary battlecry of the proposal’s opponents was one proclaiming it endangered women and girls by potentially exposing them to sexual predators.
The citizens of Houston bought into this fear and voted against the proposal — even though the final draft never stated anything about allowing a citizen to use the bathroom that reflected his or her gender identity.
It’s astonishing to see adult voters behave in such a blatantly hateful and discriminatory manner. They denied 14 other groups of people protections because of transphobia.
It’s important today’s children are properly educated on issues on diversity, gender identity and sexuality. If they aren’t, they’ll likely grow up fearing what they don’t understand — just like the voters in Houston did. Perhaps if gender neutral bathrooms were introduced to students to freely use at an early age, the issue wouldn’t seem so foreign and potentially invasive to a child’s development.
I’d like to say we could live in a world where transgender students could freely use the bathroom they deserve to use, but doing so on a mass scale today would potentially violate the privacy and comfort of children.
It boils down to which student’s rights are more important, and it sucks.
John Gavin Harp is a 20-year-old mass communication Junior from St. Francisville, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @SirJohnGavin.