By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
My hunch is that large numbers of secular leftists are experiencing what people mean when they say, “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.” They won’t admit to it openly, of course. That is what often happens in these situations. It is like the episodes when you were a kid, when you did something stupid, even after being told by your parents or teachers not to do it.
It might have been when you were warned not to put too much hot sauce on your food, or to wear a heavier coat when you went out on a cold day. You didn’t listen and ended up with a burning mouth and shivering on a street corner. But instead of admitting that you were wrong, you pretended that the food was fine and kept eating it; or insisted that you liked it when was a little cold.
Or was I the only one who had experiences along those lines? I don’t think so. I can remember seeing friends of mine putting a happy face on their mistakes in the manner I am describing.
What got me on this tangent? Was it all the bizarre tattoos we see on 20-somethings? No. Even though I am confident that the day will come when the tattooed folks will look in the mirror and moan about how stupid they were not to listen to their parents before they trotted off to the tattoo parlor.
What I have in mind is something else: the posturing liberals who pushed for transgender teenagers to be able to choose the locker room and bathroom of their choice at high school. I can’t believe that they are happy now that they see the Obama administration making their wishes come true; certainly not if they have daughters, or know someone who has daughters, or have a niece or two in their families.
The Palatine 211 school district, near Chicago, is a good example of the new reality. On November 11, in The Daily Signal, the online publication of the Heritage Foundation, Katrina Trinko reported that “Uncle Sam isn’t going to let District 211 place certain restrictions on how transgender students use” the school’s locker rooms.
The Palatine school district has tried to accommodate transgender students. Writes Trinko, “The school district calls the students by requested names, honors elected gender by allowing them to play on the sports teams of the gender they identify as belonging to, and permits them to use single-sex bathrooms, since stalls ensure privacy.”
This wasn’t enough for the Obama administration, which has decided that the district is guilty of violating Title IX, the law prohibiting sex-based discrimination. The federal government is insisting that transgender teenage boys, with a boy’s body parts, have to be permitted to shower and change in the open with the girls in their schools. No, this isn’t Candid Camera.
The school district responded with the following statement: “District 211 is not excluding transgender students from their gender-identified locker room.” The district points out that a “transgender student may use his or her gender-identified locker room simply by utilizing individual measures of privacy when changing clothes or taking showers.”
The “individual measures” requirement means that the transgender students — all the cases to date are boys who have decided to identify as girls — are permitted to use the locker rooms and showers designated for the opposite sex, but are not permitted to change and shower in “open areas” in those locker rooms, to protect the privacy rights of girls who are uncomfortable with seeing and being seen by a student with the anatomy of a teenage boy. (I have not seen these locker rooms, but I surmise this means that they are required to go to a curtained-off area within the locker room or shower.)
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights would not buy this accommodation. It insisted that this accommodation resulted in the transgender students being denied equal rights; that they were being treated differently. Catherine Lhamon, an assistant secretary at the Department of Education, stated, “District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room.” The “female” in question is, of course, a transgender with the anatomy of a teenage boy.
The Department of Education conceded that its requirement would result in “female students being observed in a state of undress by a biologically male individual,” as well as “young female students viewing a naked male in the locker room,” but insisted that these “concerns are unavailing in this case.” District 211 was threatened with “losing millions in federal funding” if it does not comply in 30 days.
Does this mean that leading Democrats in Congress and the media will henceforth be required to consent to their daughters showering and changing clothes in school locker rooms alongside classmates with the body parts of a teenage boy? You can be assured that they will say yes if asked this question by reporters. My hunch is that we can also be assured that they will make certain that such a scenario never becomes a reality; that they will make the same exception for themselves that they do when they choose expensive private schools for their children.
I am confident that even the Department of Education officials who are ramming this policy down the throats of the District 211 school district will do everything within their power to find a way to protect girls in their own families from having to experience this assault on decency and common sense. With the possible exception of militant members of the “LGBTQ community” who find a unisex world to their liking.
There is no other way to say it: What Palatine District 211 is being required to do is force the girls in its schools to live by the standards of a nudist colony. Nudists are a tiny minority on this planet. Most people view them as “quirky,” to say the least. There is no reason for them to set the standard for the rest of us. Even the tribes that are discovered living in isolation in the Amazon basin or in parts of New Guinea do not think it proper to parade around with their genitals exposed. Breasts, perhaps. But not genitals. The feds want to go one-up on them.
The federal government is willing to ignore the privacy rights of the other students in the schools faced with this question, in order to accommodate one or two transgender boys. Or as Katrina Trinko says it in her piece in The Daily Signal, the “federal government is discriminating against young girls who do not want to be forced into intimate situations with those of the opposite sex biologically.”
I keep wondering if there will ever be a final straw that will cause the country to rise up and throw the secular liberals out of power. Maybe this will be it.
+ + +
Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress