Posted on 11/08/2015 6:23:25 AM PST by Kaslin
This story starts with a transgender high school student who was born male but identifies as female. As a public high school student, she wants the school to recognize her as a girl, to call her by her new legal name, to allow her to use the girls' bathroom and to accept her in girls' athletic programs.
Her high school in Palatine, Illinois, has pretty much complied. Teachers call the girl by her female name. She uses the girls' bathroom. She plays on a girls' sports team. Except, she does hit one wall: The school doesn't provide unfettered access to girls' locker rooms where students shower or change clothes. Administrators have experimented with different arrangements -- such as a separate room. The New York Times reported the district said it would allow Student A (her name in this legal case) to change in the girls' locker room, "but only behind a curtain." Student A, for her part, "said she would probably use that curtain to change. But she and the federal government have insisted that she be allowed to make that decision voluntarily, and not because of requirements by the district."
That is not good enough for President Obama's Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which issued a letter Monday that warned Township High School District 211 is not in compliance with Title IX's ban on gender discrimination. The government contends that having different accommodations excludes Student A and denies her "the benefits of its education program" by "subjecting her to different rules of behavior" and "different treatment."
The letter explained that Student A "wanted to be a girl like every other girl."
There's a problem with that wish: Student A is not a girl like every other girl. While in transgender transition, she takes hormones, according to case documents, but remains "biologically male." "The body that transgender students have on the outside is not the identity they are on the inside," District Superintendent Daniel Cates wrote in the local newspaper.
Transgender activists may denounce the school's curtain policy as discriminatory or hateful, but I think it is in the best interests of the child. If Student A wants the other girls to think she is just like them, she probably ought to hide her penis.
Cates believes the school system has to balance Student A's privacy with the privacy concerns of all students. Girls have a privacy expectation, too. Some parents have issues about their girls changing in a room with a biological male.
I asked Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon: What about the rights of others? "All students have privacy rights and all students have rights against discrimination," she answered. Lhamon impressed upon me the fact that Student A has not been allowed in the locker room because she has not agreed to the district's terms. Her case has been in litigation for two years.
When I asked Lhamon about girls who may not want a biological male in the room where they are changing, she answered, "Any student in the locker room is able to use a privacy curtain." Cates translated: "They have the right to leave, is really what they mean." I fear many parents will consider leaving the public school system if the feds go after District 211 because they will be convinced the system will listen to everyone but them. "The problem," Cates wrote, is that the Office for Civil Rights "has no interest in creative or sensitive solutions."
There are limits to what laws can do. Without a curtain, some girls are going to see what they do not consider to be female parts. Is that in Student A's best interest? Lhamon responded, "I don't make decisions for this girl or any other girl." And: "The district has not let her into the locker room. That lack of access violates the law."
In the end, I suspect, the district and the feds will come to an agreement -- that all kids can have curtains. Or access to curtains. Lhamon and Cates see that possibility, too.
It must take immense courage for a teenager to announce to the world that, even though she was born with male anatomy, inside she knows she is a girl. Even if Student A prevails and gets the district to back down, that doesn't mean other students will accept her.
The Office for Civil Rights maintains that Student A should be treated like any other girl, even as it recognizes Student A is "a transitioning transgender girl." Student A clearly painfully wants to be accepted. The school district has tried to accommodate her, but it can only do so much.
Debra doesn’t want to be insensitive. However, I think she - and every even-slightly-conservative writer who uses “she” for a boy - is missing an opportunity to make a stand while being genuinely polite.
A lot of unnecessarily rude and unkind language is directed at transformers, and I don’t think that’s helpful in any way. However, to refer to a biologically male person as a boy/man/he/him, and a biologically female person as girl/woman/she/her, is simply recognizing reality. It is also charitable, just as it’s charitable to refer to anyone with a delusion by his or her real identity.
IIRC many of them suicide in a few years!
We had one in our building at work, and had to attend too many classes on the subject.
For the transition period he to she was provided a special washroom. The women were going to mutiny if it was allowed in their rooms!
About two years, dead by his/her own hand.
Sorry, “carbon-based” is not PC...climate change and all that. Maybe “accidental, resource-devouring, animated, multi-celled protoplasm”
Debra should have uses quotation marks for "her" and "she" when she was referring to the student.
“She” will always be a biological male regardless of the surgery and hormones to hide the fact. I wonder just how many if any kids referred to the gender bender therapists by loony parents are ever sent home without being diagnosed as being the wrong sex? I think there is a whole industry of therapists and doctors who for the money perpetuate this BS about kids being a gender other than the one they were born with.
I actually live in Palatine. Even though we live in the boundaries of this HS, my wife and I decided to send our kids to St. Viator in Arlington Heights. It was a bit farther but the best decision we have ever made.
As for parents leaving the public school system, I’m not sure what would be their alternative. The Catholic and christian academies have waiting lists.
I agree things have really changed in the area...some good, some bad. My belief most of the bad is from more intrusion of the Feds.
Same with “gay”. Refuse to use that word, I call them homosexuals every time. Is that offensive to them? Do you think I will get sued and loose my job/business and then my home?
This will last long enough for a decent kid that plays say basketball - good but not real good - declaring himself a ‘her’ and trying out for the basketball team. Will be hard to not accept him as he is ‘good’ enough to make at least the boys JV team, if not the Varsity.
One of the ‘arguments’ they used to use was about showering and changing in the same locker room.
How can the High Schools and Olympic committees BAN someone that claims to be another ‘type’?
In a ‘sane’ society it would be one way or the other, NOT whatever is on the mind of the clown in charge at any given moment.
Years ago there was a cartoon (Tank McNamara - I think) that had a ‘Black’ character paint himself White as he was considered an outstanding player as a ‘White’ but mediocre as a ‘Black’.
Also a ‘joke’ around that time that had a ‘Black’ kid paint himself ‘White’ and go home and his father ‘kicked his arse’ with the kid screaming ‘My friends are right, I been ‘White’ for 6 hours and I hate you ‘n.......’ already.
OTOH, what do we expect?
‘We’ celebrated a Bruce calling himself Caitlin, then getting named woman of the year (GREAT cartoon-
What gender/pay problem?...Bruce Jenner got 50 thou a speech and Caitlin gets 2 mill??), a White woman gets praised for declaring herself black etc etc etc etc
Military today filled with the ‘types’ WE wanted to get away from back in the 40s/50s/60s etc, the ‘do funnys’, the ‘weirdos’, nagging mothers and sisters etc etc etc
Easy fix. All normals quit sports. He can do everything he wants, wherever.
If that happens, he is DEFINITELY not a girl.
“What happens when the parent-propelled perv, still with his male naughty bits, gets into the shower with the girls and pops a woodie?”
Just hope if that happens that one of the ladies there has a straight razor available!
This is not "courage". It is psychosis.
Every single opposing team for the 'girls' sports teams this young man with a delusion plays against should sue. If he is involved in any sports related incident or accident where another player is hurt, the hurt player should sue. Males - even those on female steroids - are (generally) physically stronger than females of the same size, and therefore the opposing players are at higher risk of injury, even within the rules of the various games.
And the idiot quoted in the article from Title IX (I think) should simply be tazed into a coma, and left there.
Maybe you can succeed, since we hadn’t had a president since 2009, we had a king...
True, but a few people DO have issues like XXY, XXXY, and others..however, it isn’t 25%...
In today’s hyper-sensitive PC culture one old axiom still rings true (perhaps truer than ever if that is even possible since truth is truth): “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”.
Of course that means telling the truth comes with ever higher prices as society dives further into delusion.
I guess you probably know the answer to your question.
Keep your powder dry my FRiend ;)
hear, hear!
Very good post. From the safe anonymity of our keyboards, we should practice the simple but revolutionary step of referring to a male person as “he” and a female person as “she.” Having done that, we might be in the habit of it should we ever have to deal with a transformer in real life.
Most of us probably won’t. You’d think, from all the fuss, that half the country was cross-dressing, but there really aren’t that many.
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Good article (note: go to link, copy title, put it in browser, then click on the article in the results to get past the 'wall'):
Excerpts:
With body dysmorphic disorder, an often socially crippling condition, the individual is consumed by the assumption "I'm ugly." These disorders occur in subjects who have come to believe that some of their psycho-social conflicts or problems will be resolved if they can change the way that they appear to others. Such ideas work like ruling passions in their subjects' minds and tend to be accompanied by a solipsistic argument.
For the transgendered, this argument holds that one's feeling of "gender" is a conscious, subjective sense that, being in one's mind, cannot be questioned by others. The individual often seeks not just society's tolerance of this "personal truth" but affirmation of it. Here rests the support for "transgender equality," the demands for government payment for medical and surgical treatments, and for access to all sex-based public roles and privileges.
We at Johns Hopkins University - which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into "sex-reassignment surgery" - launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as "satisfied" by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn't have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a "satisfied" but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.
It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study - up to 30 years - followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.
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