The latest salvo in the national debate about transgender rights was fired yesterday by US district judge Reed O’Connor in Texas, who granted an injunction against the federal government’s guidance on allowing transgender students access to the bathroom based on their gender identity. What has been lost in the lawsuits and injunctions is the impact on real students.
These students are not some abstract threat. The hundreds of thousands of transgender children in our nation’s schools simply want to learn and be respected. But these young people were barely mentioned in O’Connor’s 38-page ruling – a ruling that ordered the Obama administration not to lift a finger to investigate discrimination against transgender students.
It’s a shame that O’Connor probably hasn’t met a transgender student like Skye Thomson. Skye is a high school sophomore from Eastern North Carolina. He told The View in June that he has been afraid to use public bathrooms since his home state’s anti-transgender bathroom law passed. His birth certificate still lists him as female, but he has lived as a boy for years. Skye’s mom was heartbroken, saying: “It’s infuriating. This is my kid.”
Aside from ignoring the impact on students, the ruling also failed to mention that it was actually educators, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals, who asked the administration to issue its recent guidance on how to best accommodate transgender students. There was also no hint that the federal guidance, or any of the hundreds of existing state and local policies it was based on, had caused any harm to anyone. That’s why 13 states filed an amicus brief telling the court that “plaintiffs’ predicted safety harm has never materialized”, and that all privacy concerns were easily addressed.
While the politicians who filed this case claim the education department is making up law, it’s in fact O’Connor’s ruling that lacks legal precedent, not to mention human compassion. Students like Skye are being scapegoated by fearmongering politicians simply because of who they are. More than a dozen federal courts have ruled that federal anti-sex-discrimination laws, such as the Title IX education law, protect transgender people. And just because O’Connor wrote in his decision that “it cannot be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex” is limited to “anatomical differences”, that doesn’t make it true. In fact, the supreme court disputed that meaning in 1989, when it ruled that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender stereotypes.
The issue of how to best treat transgender students is new to many people. But it’s not new to schools around the country that have been supporting students like Skye for years. They know that there is nothing to be afraid of here. Anyone who has used a public restroom has shared one with a transgender person, and likely never knew it. But when transgender students are discriminated against and forced to use a separate bathroom, there are real harms. Their classmates see them walking past the communal bathrooms down the hall to the lone single-user toilet. To them, the school itself is saying something is wrong with this child.
When transgender people, young or old, fear that they won’t be able to do something as simple as use a restroom that reflects who they are, the consequences are serious. Our organization surveyed nearly 28,000 transgender people last year. Well over half reported they had avoided using a public restroom out of fear of harassment. Nearly a third had limited their food and water intake because of this fear. And thousands reported medical issues such as bladder or kidney infections from “holding it” – all because they could not access an appropriate restroom.
Most schools are already getting this right, and more are learning every day about the importance of supporting transgender students. One soon-to-be-appealed ruling from a single judge won’t change that much needed progress towards acceptance and respect.
- This article was changed on 24 August 2016. An earlier version confused a 1988 ruling by Antonin Scalia with the supreme court’s 1989 ruling on gender