The K-12 Binary
Schools are becoming ground zero for clashes over transgender rights.
Casey Hoke would spend an average of two minutes out of his seven-hour school day in the restroom. “That’s it. Business as usual. No one bats an eye,” Hokewrote in January, back when he was a high-school senior in Louisville, Kentucky. “How we go about our business is none of yours.”
By “we,” Hoke was referring to transgender students. He was primarily addressing Kentucky’s legislature, which at the time was considering a bill that would’ve cracked down on transgender students’ use of K-12 bathrooms. The legislation would’ve legally required schools to ensure that children follow anatomical conventions when using gender-segregated school facilities: that children who were born boys but identify as girls use the boys’ restroom, and vice versa. What Hoke found particularly egregious about the “Kentucky Student Privacy Act” was that, in its original version, the legislation also would’ve entitledstudents who sued offenders in state court to damages of $2,500 each. Hoke compared this proposed system to a witch hunt.
The legislation died in committee well before the session ended, with the bill’s author, the Senator C.B. Embry, withdrawing it amid concerns over its legality. But such debates will surely continue—and not only because of the global fascination with Caitlyn Jenner. Bills similar to the one in Kentucky were introduced and later died in states including Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, andTexas.
Meanwhile, controversies related to transgender youth regularly pop up at individual schools and districts across the country. For example, Virginia’s Stafford school board enforced a policy similar to the Kentucky legislation earlier this year after one school allowed a transgender male to use the boys’ restroom. Just last month, a 16-year-old transgender student filed a lawsuit against a school board in another Virginia district over a similar policy that required the student to use an “alternative” restroom instead. The U.S. Department of Education, which last year made it clear that Title IX also applies to transgender students, recentlyfiled a statement of interest in support of the student.
At least two lawsuits—one involving a first-grader in Colorado and another involving Nicole Maines, a high-schooler in Maine—have upheld access to bathrooms for transgender children, the latter of which awarded Maines’s family $75,000. And the New York Civil Liberties Union released an in-depth reportlast month that’s said to document “the serious and pervasive discrimination and harassment faced by transgender and gender nonconforming youth” in public schools across the state of New York.
The country is in the midst of what Time magazine last March dubbed “The Transgender Tipping Point,” which helps explain why these controversies are becoming more prevalent. And schools are emerging as the fulcrum for that Bathrooms, Sports, and Pronouns: How Transgender Students Are Navigating School Discrimination - The Atlantic:
