Girls at a Colorado high school are being forced to allow an older boy to use their bathrooms as the result of a policy of transgender accommodation and the girls are being threatened with punishment if their complaints don’t stop.
The debate is happening in Florence, Colorado, located near Colorado Springs. Parents of several girls are seeking a legal remedy after their daughters were required to share bathrooms with a male who maintains his true gender identity is that of a woman.
“First of all, it’s our position that a teenage boy’s presence into the bathroom for teenage girls is inherently harassing. It’s inherently violative of their privacy rights. It’s also intimidating when you have a boy like this, who is not a freshman, going in there with younger freshman girls. They feel violated. They feel intimidated, and that’s been expressed to us,” said Matthew McReynolds, staff attorney at the Pacific Justice Institute, who is representing the families of the girls involved.
The girls further allege the boy has made sexually harassing comments in that setting.
“Details continue to emerge on this in terms of what what kind of comments may have been made. We’ve heard some reports that he’s commented on what girls are wearing or their figure while in the bathroom. If you can imagine that scenario from the reference and framework of a teenage girl, I think that’s pretty harassing,” said McReynolds, who reiterated that a boy simply being in the girls’ restroom is ample harassment in itself.
Also galling to the female students and their parents is the backlash the girls have suffered from their own school administrators, who have vowed to punish the students if their protests persist.
“Some of the students have been warned that they need to stop talking about this. They need to stop talking about their constitutional privacy rights, more or less, or they may face repercussions in areas such as participation on school athletic teams,” said McReynolds, who detailed the legal efforts to rectify the problem.
“What we’re really going for is a solution that can be workable for everybody involved. That’s what we don’t have right now. Our students are in a scenario where they’re being told, ‘If you don’t want to be in this situation where this guy walks in while you’re in the bathroom, then you’ve got to confine yourself to one staff bathroom that is very inconvenient, that’s not even open all the time that they’re on campus for athletic activities and things like that. You just have to give up your right to use the other dozen or so bathrooms on campus. You just have to clear out so that this one other student can do whatever he wants,'” said McReynolds.
“There are workable solutions short of litigation that are available. We hope the school will go that direction. They haven’t given us much indication yet of what they are going to do. There can be solutions that can be acceptable if not perfect to both sides,” he said.
McReynolds and the Pacific Justice Institute were actively involved in unsuccessful opposition to California’s AB 1266, legislation passed earlier this year to allow self-identifying transgender students to use restrooms designated for the opposite sex. it is scheduled to take effect in January. He says one of many problems with this movement is the lack of a threshold for some to receive transgender recognition.
“That’s one of the really troubling aspects to this. It depends on who you ask and it depends on where you go. Here in California, the new law we have really has no standards for how you determine gender identity. That’s fairly consistent as you look around the country and seems to be the case in Colorado as well,” said McReynolds.
“Colorado has some specific regulations that refer to situations where students will be in a state of undress, which is obviously one of the big concerns here. It says that reasonable accommodations have to be made for transgender students. There’s a lot of vagueness and haziness in there but that’s what we’re plowing through in this scenario,” he said.
But he says the goal of the transgender activists is very clear.
“They would insist that every school district in America is subject to these same kinds of situations and scenarios because of the way that they would interpret federal laws like Title IX and just general definitions of gender,” said McReynolds.
“We’re starting to see it all over the place. If you do the math, experts tell us transgender individuals make up about .3 percent of the population. So if you have a high school campus with a couple thousand kids on it as is the case in a lot of places, there’s a pretty good likelihood that within that school or within that district, and especially as these kinds of behavior become more bold, you’re going to be seeing more and more of these,” said McReynolds.
Transgender activists are largely dismissing this story, claiming the girls are likely either trying to get the male student in trouble because they don’t like him or concocting stories of harassment because of opposition to the policy. McReynolds is not buying the argument that this is much ado about nothing.
“If there were nothing to this, I don’t think the school district would be currently conducting a law enforcement investigation, which is what they’re doing. Beyond that, you’ve got to ask yourself, when you have somebody who is acting very peculiarly to say the least, sometimes dressing as a girl and sometimes dressing as a boy, why are we indulging that and making everybody else pretend like that is normal, when clearly it’s not,” said McReynolds.
The speed with which issues like this have emerged throughout our culture even surprises McReynolds, but he says the warnings against enabling this movement are already coming true.
“Just a few years ago, this wasn’t on much of anybody’s radar. Now we find ourselves right in the middle of it. Just a few months ago, I testified before the California legislature on AB 1266 on this same issue and it was just astounding for me to listen to the things being said on the other side. Again and again, we heard there would be no problems with this legislation, that we were just being ‘transphobic’ for suggesting that there might be problems resulting from these kinds of policies,” said McReynolds.
“Now, unfortunately, what we predicted is coming true in a number of different locations,” he said.
