A handful of transgender or gender non-conforming students attend the five public high schools in Township High School District 211, based in Palatine, Illinois, but the district is providing those students with bathroom and locker room use regulations that protect only some of their rights, the Arlington Heights Daily Herald reports.
Specifically, the district says it allows transgender students to access bathrooms according to the sex with which they identify, since bathrooms at the high schools have individual stalls, and to play on sports teams according to that gender, since the Illinois High School Association has issued rules on this matter and Title IX of the US Code requires this access.
But the board reached a decision Monday that it will not allow transgender students to use locker room showers and changing areas according to the gender with which they identify and they must either use the showers and changing areas according to their biological sex or a gender-neutral changing area and shower designated specifically for them.
“We believe that we would be compromising other students’ privacy if we [allowed transgender students to access showers and changing areas in accordance with their identified gender]. We do not believe we are discriminating,” Dan Cates, the district’s superintendent, was quoted as saying in a letter issued earlier this week. He added that there are transgender students in each of District 211’s five high schools. “They are asking us to have opposite-sex students in the same open area of the locker room and showers. We do not do that.”
Voxitatis reported last week that the Human Rights Campaign defines “transgender or gender non-conforming” students as those “whose gender identity or expression is different from that typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth (e.g., the sex listed on their birth certificate).”
The American Civil Liberties Union is said to be representing an unnamed transgender female student at an unnamed high school in the district. She and the ACLU claim they have been denied their rights under federal law and rulings that give them unrestricted access to girls’ locker rooms at the school for the purposes of changing clothes and showering.
“In this particular case, we just don’t agree that the federal government should be dictating where we should be going, and that it’s not in the best interest of all students to have unrestricted access to the locker rooms,” school board President Mucia Burke was quoted as saying. “This is really uncharted waters.”
One of the board’s newest members, Peter Dombrowski, said all board members agreed with the decision, the Daily Herald noted. Because the district is now out of compliance with federal law after making this decision, federal funding—about $6 million—is threatened, but most people in education consider this either an idle threat or one that will take so long to bring about that the issue should be resolved by the time any funding could be taken away.
But, “At the end of the day, regardless of money, our job is to balance everybody’s needs,” Mr Dombrowski was quoted as saying. “The whole board is on board for this. We’re at a consensus. I don’t see anyone not willing to go through the next step of the process.”
Editorial
This is why locally elected officials cannot make decisions that affect the rights of individuals, even local decisions. This logic is similar to states who believed they had the right to allow individuals to own slaves despite federal law. “The federal government should not dictate how we provide for students’ rights at the local level,” they say.
That argument would take away rights from students, not provide them, if it were allowed to carry through to full fruition and applied to rights other than transgender or gender non-conforming rights that students have.
District 211 should immediately reconsider this issue and provide transgender students in the district with unrestricted access to locker rooms and changing rooms according to the gender with which they identify, not according to the sex identified by a doctor at birth.
The solution of gender-neutral changing areas is fine for protecting the rights of other students at the school, and those students are in the overwhelming majority. Civil rights, however, are generally about the rights of the minority and certainly disallow actions or decisions that would move toward a tyranny of the majority. Forcing transgender students to change or shower in an area that is separated from their friends and teammates denies those students their right of assembly.
The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has made rulings in this matter, and rest assured, those rulings follow federal law and demand that District 211 allow access to gender-specific changing and showering areas for transgender students.
“Our federal civil rights laws demand that all students—women and men; gay and straight; transgender or not; citizens and foreign students—be allowed to learn and participate in all parts of college life without sexual assault and harassment limiting their opportunities,” said Catherine E Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the US Department of Education, last year in a ruling and guidance statement on the issue.
District 211’s board has gone rogue and is violating those rights with this decision, which they claim safeguards rights. Their logic is staggering.