Transgender timeout
In barring enforcement of the Obama administration’s edict on access to bathrooms and locker rooms by transgender students, a federal judge in Texas implicitly zeroed on why the mandate provoked a backlash. Judge Reed O’Connor’s nationwide injunction rests soundly on the proposition that the administration overreached by issuing its so-called guidance to school districts without giving the public an opportunity to comment on it.
Jointly, President Obama’s education and justice departments took the position that an individual’s sex would be determined by self-identification rather than by his or her biology at birth.
That landmark change required schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom or locker room of their choices under Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting education discrimination based on sex.
O’Connor concluded, however, that, when Congress passed Title IX, lawmakers and regulators assumed a biological definition of the word “sex.”
Additionally, he noted that federal regulators gave schools an exemption from totally equal access to facilities by permitting them to maintain bathroom and locker room facilities for boys and girls because boys and girls may be wholly or partially naked and “separation from members of the opposite sex, those who bodies possessed a different anatomical structure, was needed to ensure personal privacy.”
Ruling out accommodations for transgender students, such as privacy curtains or separate bathrooms, Obama described ensuring bathroom and locker room access as a matter of fundamental civil rights.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch went so far as to recall the Jim Crow era of separate facilities for African Americans.
To clarify: There is no room for excluding or shaming transgender young people. They are owed full participation in school life, including athletic teams. At the same time, the privacy of boys and girls undergoing sexual development demands respect.
O’Connor’s ruling, if upheld, will give America the opportunity to reach an informed national consensus on the proper balancing of rights and privacy.