By Susan Stamper Brown

Dear parents, when you vote next November, please remember which party wants your daughters to share their school locker rooms and showers with boys.

That’s right, the Obama administration’s Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) recently ruled that Township High School District 211 in Palatine, Illinois must give a transgender kid, who was born a male and still has the private parts to prove it, unrestricted access to the girls’ facilities or they lose millions in federal funding.

It’s not that the school district didn’t do its best to accommodate the gender-confused kid whom OCR calls “Student A” in its 14-page report which charges the school district with discrimination on the basis of sex due to the kid’s “gender identity and gender nonconformity” issues.

The report states the district “honored Student A’s request to be treated as female in all respects except her request to be provided access to the girls’ locker rooms at the school.” Specifically, the district agreed to use Student A’s female name, designating him as a “female” in the computer system. It obtained special permission from the Illinois High School Association to allow him to participate in girls’ athletics. He received unlimited access to all the girls’ restrooms and access to dress out and shower in the girls’ locker room, given he do it behind a privacy curtain.

Student A refused to accept the district’s privacy curtain demand so the Obama administration stepped in.

Okay, call me politically incorrect here, but this is unequivocally wrong. As a fellow XX chromosome-bearer, I’d be mortified. I remember the first time I was forced to dress out in my school’s female-only locker room. I was a late bloomer and pretty embarrassed that I was the only girl in the room that didn’t need a bra. The last thing I needed was a boy in the locker room, whether he wore pink bows in his hair or not. Certainly, had a boy been factored in my locker room scenario, my father would’ve had a polite but frank chat with the powers-that-be, including the kid’s parents. Growing up is tough enough with all the awkwardness of adolescence without forcing kids to conform to this craziness.

But that was then. Now we have the Obama administration forcing school districts to comply with its tragically misguided version of things, letting the views and rights of the many be damned to the advantage of a statistical few.

This poor kid needs help. What he doesn’t need is for society to join him in this delusion that changing in a girls’ locker room will in any way change who he really is. The difference between males and females is in their genes, not the jeans they choose to wear.

Anyhow, what kind of government gives this kind of ultimatum to a school district at the expense of the privacy rights of young girls? It’s funny, though, how interested they become in female privacy rights if the subject is abortion — or birth control for minor girls without parental consent.

Palatine, Illinois parents should stand alongside school district leaders against this bizarre federal government overreach. And maybe it’s time to have that conversation about cutting the umbilical cord. The government can make those threats to withhold federal funding as long as school districts keep their hands open.

Offering school vouchers so parents can choose private schools would give kids the opportunity to get better educations without all the liberal brainwashing and social experimentation. And for the minuscule number of parents demanding unisex facilities for their kids, let them petition the government to build a unisex school with no boundaries. I’m sure that would work out swell.

  WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU WORKING TO SOLVE?

Like every industry, journalism has a labor problem. As media companies have grappled with digital disruption, they’ve responded by cutting jobs and salaries, but not necessarily cutting “content.” That work has instead been assigned to a growing legion of freelancers and contractors — independent work that has always existed, but that has taken on a more vital role to the survival of many cash-strapped media institutions, both new and legacy.

With so many opportunities yet so few resources, freelancers are by nature pitted against one another in a race to the bottom. This doesn’t work particularly well for anyone: for editors, who need a consistent and high-quality pool of writing, staffers, who risk being undercut at their jobs, or readers, who want to support living wages for workers.

This is not to say that freelance journalism can’t work! But it can’t work like this.

How Would Solving This Problem Help Journalism?

While the Internet has done much to lower the entry barrier to media work — which is great — it’s also lowered the standards of that work — which is not great. Many freelancers report that they receive little to no editing or fact-checking. In a race to pump out more “content,” this has the potential to result in huge errors — and to promote a different kinds of journalism altogether.

In an industry that prides itself on transparency and ethics, there are no standards as to how these workers or their work should be treated. Living wages and ethical work standards are in everyone’s best interest.

Who Is Tackling A Similar Problem And How Is Your Approach Different?

There are many efforts aimed at supporting independent workers across industries. Projects specific to journalism — such as Contently, Beacon and WordRates — have largely centered on gig-matching, which has its own strengths, but does not address many of the issues facing freelancers.

A single tool or platform can’t fix such a complex problem. I believe organizing of freelancers is best done in small cooperative affinity guilds, where problems such as lack of administrative and legal assistance, libel insurance, press passes, and tools, and service fees can be better solved. The first step toward this vision is promoting more transparency and cooperation in a field that’s traditionally very individualistic and competitive. I plan to negotiate with writers, editors, and publishers to find common ground on these issues. I’m also talking to creators of digital payment and publishing tools about how those might better work for independent journalists.

What Are The First Questions You Plan To Pursue?

• Is this employment shift in media to more contracts and fewer jobs actually indicative of and part of a larger shift in work across industries? If so, what does that mean for freelance journalists, and how might we work in solidarity with freelancers in other industries?
• Who are the freelance journalists working in the U.S. today? Where are they, how are they working, and for how much?
• In what ways does contract journalism work and not work for editors and publishers? How do they perceive freelancers? Who do they think we are, and how do they think we work?

What Are The First Steps You Plan To Take In Working On Your Challenge?

I’m interviewing freelancers, editors and publishers about these labor issues and will be publishing some of that work on Patreon for my subscribers. Those funds will support some of my more ambitious plans for this project. The first batch will go toward making Who Pays Writers, a project of Manjula Martin and Scratch Magazine, into a searchable database.

Who Pays is an unmatched resource for freelancers — users submit not just rates, but also information about how long payment took, the terms of their contracts, and any other issues that arose. Overall, this data shows that there are no standard terms or rates for writers, even at the same publication.

We also have some more ambitious plans for using this data to better promote wage transparency.