Pearland schools continue debate on bathroom access
Back in the spring, countless news cycles ago, a lot of Texans were in a lather over an issue that came to be known as the bathroom wars.
To recap: The Obama administration issued guidelines saying local school districts should let children use the bathroom that conformed to their gender identity. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued to block the guidelines; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged school officials to ignore them. Locally, the superintendent of the Pearland school district, John Kelly, suggested that the guidelines might lead the nation toward approval of pedophilia and polygamy. (Kelly also took a dim view of marriage equality).
That was in May. In the ensuing months, attention turned to other matters: two national political conventions, Donald Trump’s latest insults, Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Olympics. But in Pearland, at least, the transgender issue — which obviously is about a lot more than bathrooms — contin-
ued to percolate.
Speakers at Pearland ISD’s monthly board meetings kept talking about it. Some defended Kelly; others repeated calls for him to resign or apologize for his remarks. (He has done neither.) And while all of this was going on, Kimberly Shappley felt growing anxiety as she prepared to enroll her 5-year old child in kindergarten at a Pearland elementary school.
Shappley’s daughter, Kai, was born a boy but now lives as a girl. Shappley says school officials have told her Kai must use the boys’ bathroom or get special accommodations, such as in the school nurse’s office. She believes this policy sends a message that will make Kai’s struggle to live authentically even more difficult. (The school district noted that all kindergarten classrooms have a “private, genderneutral bathroom.”)
‘Fighting for freedom’
“I’m fighting for her happiness,” Shappley told the board Tuesday. “I’m fighting for her freedom.”
A mother trying to protect her child is a universally sympathetic figure, but it’s clear that many are skeptical about this whole “gender identification” business, particularly in the case of a preschool-age child. Comments posted to news articles and in other forums claim that a little boy’s flights of fancy about being a girl will pass if a parent refuses to indulge them. The “T” in “LGBT” seems, for many, to be the toughest letter to handle.
“We would acknowledge that most Americans and most Texans do not have an accurate understanding of who transgender people are,” said Chuck Smith, the CEO of Equality Texas, a nonprofit focused on LGBT rights. Compared to attitudes about gay men and lesbians, Smith said, public views of transgender people “are where they were 20 to 30 years ago.”
Another Pearland parent, Kim Ambro, boiled the issue down to its essence when she spoke to the school board in June. Ambro said she believed Kelly’s remarks had been misinterpreted.
“I believe … he was drawing attention to the slippery slope that seems inevitable from a need to redefine once-commonsense matters, like what makes a man a man, a woman a woman, or a marriage a marriage,” Ambro said.
No time to wait
So, what makes a man a man or a woman a woman? The answer may not be as simple as Ambro and others believe.
Doctors at the GENECIS program at Children’s Health in Dallas, the only transgender pediatric program in the Southwest, work with children diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a condition that occurs when someone experiences distress because they don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. The condition can lead to depression, anxiety and suicide.
The doctors at GENECIS provide counseling and “gender-affirming” medical care. They help parents like Shappley, who says she had tried to force Kai to live as a boy — putting away feminine toys, enduring screams when she cut the child’s hair — before coming to terms with who her daughter truly is.
For decades, people believed sexual orientation was a choice. Many no doubt still feel this way, but because of a Supreme Court decision, same-sex marriages happen every day. The same process is necessary as people grapple with the notion that a child born with a boy’s anatomy might, in some deep psychic place that transcends the body, actually be a girl.
The problem is that parents like Kimberly Shappley don’t have time to wait for public attitudes to catch up with scientific understanding of gender identity. Their children’s lives are at stake now.