THE WAR ON GIRLS’ PRIVACY

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.