Transgender issue raises many questions

The Tuesday Dispatch article “Turmoil for transgenders” raised several basic questions:

1. How many transgenders are there in the national population? A good estimate is needed, but not from the Human Rights Campaign, which is an advocacy group, so its estimate should be taken with a grain of salt.

Apparently, many school districts, out of concern for fairness to transgender students, are willing to them students to use the bathroom that matches their self-identity, male or female, regardless of the concerns of the vast majority of other students.

2. What happens when they graduate and go out into the real world? When they sign up for a driver’s license, what box do they check on the application form? Their oath as to their sex identity cannot be supported by gene or medical identification. Production of a birth certificate (or a physical exam) will conflict with their self-identification. Are there legal penalties for “misstatements?”

3. When they leave school and turn 18, do they sign up, as required by law, to register for the federal draft? If so, under which heading, as now only males are required to register. If a male identifies as a female, will he not get the form (at any post office) to register? Does a female, who identifies as a male, obtain the form and sign up as a male ? Either way, their actions can have bad outcomes; outcomes the school systems have not prepared them for in the real world.

R.B. Williams Columbus