The College Fix – by Lexi Lonas
A federal court permitted a lawsuit to proceed against an Illinois school district that allows high school boys to use girls’ locker rooms, restrooms and showers in order to accommodate transgender students.
But girls who don’t want to be seen naked by boys got bad news: The judge ruled that they have no right to “visual bodily privacy” if the government says so.
Dozens of families sued the Chicago-area Township High School District 211 three years ago due to its policy letting students as young as 14 choose to use the locker rooms of the opposite sex.
“All the students must use the restroom with the knowledge that someone of the opposite sex is present or could walk in at any time,” their lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom wrote in a background document on the case.
It makes the stakes clear: “If our government is powerful enough to command innocent school children to disrobe in the presence of opposite-sex classmates, then there will be little it will not be powerful enough to do.”
The plaintiffs, organized as Students and Parents for Privacy, are composed of 52 families made up of 136 parents and current and future students who are “being forced to use the restroom, or change clothes, with someone of the opposite sex in the room.”
U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso is letting Title IX and religious freedom claims go forwardwhile throwing out other claims. Tom Petersen, director of community relations for the district, emphasized that “only three” claims are going forward.
“The District will continue to defend our practices that affirm and support the identity of all our students,” he wrote in an email to The College Fix.
When The Fix asked the alliance what has happened in the case for the past three years, a spokesperson said it was “waiting on clarity from our attorney on this” but has not responded since Tuesday.
Risking ‘urinary tract infections’ and missing class time count as ‘injuries in fact’
Township High School District 211 did not initially choose to let biological males look at females in a partial or total state of undress.
The Obama administration’s Department of Education threatened to take away federal funding in 2015 unless the school district changed its policy. It received $6 million in 2014.
Though the district already allowed the male student at the heart of the complaint to shower and dress in a private area of the girls’ locker room, federal officials said that accommodation “subjected the student to stigma and different treatment.” The district changed the policy without telling parents or students, and girls found out “when they walked into their restroom and came face-to-face with Student A,” the male student who identifies as female.
Before the girls’ locker room was opened to Student A but after the restrooms were, a non-plaintiff girl “who had been sexually assaulted previously” saw Student A’s penis, according to Alonso: “District 211 failed to investigate or remediate the situation.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom argued the case on three factors: the financial coercion from the Department of Education was unlawful and the revised policy violates both constitutional privacy rights and Title IX.
The revised policy caused girls “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation, and loss of dignity,” according to the lawsuit.
Judge Alonso knocked down the school district’s first argument, that Students and Parents for Privacy does not have “associational standing” because it has not named “any individual members.”
The allegation that the girls “have been startled, shocked, embarrassed and frightened by the presence of Student A in the girls’ restroom” is an injury “sufficient to establish standing,” he said.
Alonso noted the lengths to which the girls have allegedly gone to avoid sharing intimate facilities with boys, which count as “injuries in fact.”
One “walks around all day in sweaty, dirty gym clothes” under her school clothes, some risk “urinary tract infections, dehydration and constipation” by using school restrooms as little as possible, and others “miss instructional time” by waiting to relieve themselves until class periods.
#1, will you please post your favorite graphic for me?
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