How Obama’s Latest Locker Room Fiat Affects Your Family
The North Carolina transgender fight has gone national, thanks to a letter from the Obama Administration.
According to a report published Thursday night at the New York Times:
A letter to school districts will go out Friday, adding to a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue. The declaration — signed by Justice and Education department officials — will describe what schools should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against.
So, as soon as a parent or guardian says that a child’s identified gender changes, or “differs from previous representations or records,” public schools have to comply and treat the child as such.
“No student should ever have to go through the experience of feeling unwelcome at school or on a college campus,” reads a statement from Department of Education Secretary John B. King on the issue. “We must ensure that our young people know that whoever they are or wherever they come from, they have the opportunity to get a great education in an environment free from discrimination, harassment and violence.”
The 25-page letter also provides information on how schools should best use a child’s preferred name and pronouns.
In effect, the letter uses similar reasoning to a recent decision by a panel of judges in the Fourth Judicial Circuit, which interpreted Title XI of the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1972’s language on discrimination to include gender based on identity, rather than biological sex.
“Although title IX of the United States Education Amendments of 1972 was designed to prohibit discrimination in schools against one gender, the Obama administration took it upon itself to “expand” the law to redefine gender itself,” explained CR Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz regarding the Fourth Circuit Ruling. “In January 2015, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights promulgated a regulation barring schools from assigning bathroom facilities based on biological gender, demanding they instead assign them based on someone’s chosen gender. In addition to representing a facial absurdity, this opinion was lawless and a complete bastardization of a congressional statute.”
“The gravity of this new low in the ever-steep slippery slope of judicial tyranny and licentiousness cannot be overstated. ‘As Paul Judge Niemeyer, the lone dissenter observed, the court literally redefined the definition of ‘sex’ from the bench and ‘for the first time ever, holds that a public high school may not provide separate restrooms and locker rooms on the basis of biological sex.’”
Horowitz’s warning appears to have merit, because, whereas the ruling still only applies to the case in question, the Administration’s Friday edict takes the reasoning a step further by applying it to public school districts across the country.
As stated above, the letter does not carry the force of law, but it does carry the potential force of funding, the implications of which potentially mirror those of the Department of Justice’s recent lawsuit against the State of North Carolina, which passed a law in April that prohibited local governments from enforcing private sector multiple-use facility policies ordinances on identity, rather than biology. As a result of the DOJ’s actions, the Tar Heel State could lose billions of dollars in federal monies. Likewise, schools that do not comply with the administration’s decree could face similar lawsuits or a loss of federal funds.
“The administration’s new guidelines simply reinforce what has been abundantly clear already — that it has a political goal of forcing women to share restrooms and locker rooms with men across the nation and will spread falsehoods about federal law to achieve its aims,” says Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Jeremy Tedesco in a statement.
In short, this means that, while the decree outlines some “emerging orders” such as installing privacy curtains and allowing kids to change in bathroom stalls, schools now have to allow biological males to use the same restrooms, locker rooms, and showers alongside biological females. All they need is a note from home…or else.
“It is very clear that the federal government is an education bully. It uses its 9 percent of public-school funding to direct the other 91 percent, in a manner largely unaccountable to parents and taxpayers,” Pullman told CR education research fellow at The Heartland Institute, managing editor at The Federalist, and author of the forthcoming “Coretastrophe: What Common Core Means for America’s Future,” explained to CR when asked about a related issue in February. “Federal bureaucrats will never know what is best for individual children, but they will inevitably believe they can know this and attempt to force it on families local and communities. They should have no available leverage to do so.”
Perhaps the most troubling issue about the move is that it isn’t really about bathrooms; it’s about executive power. Much like on the issue of “climate change,” the Administration has declared itself a scientific arbiter of what constitutes the very nature on man and woman. However, just like on the issue of climate change, there is still disagreement among experts on the subject.
As explained in a previous article at Conservative Review:
The American Psychiatric Association defines “gender dysphoria” as having a “marked difference between [someone’s] expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her.” Furthermore, the condition must “continue for at least six months” to reach the threshold of diagnosis.
Psychologists disagree about how to best treat this condition, which most LGBT advocates argue is a natural condition. Some say the only way to address it is to allow and encourage people to dress and act in accordance with their “expressed/experienced gender.” This includes using the restroom of the perceived gender, undergoing treatments that alter the human body, gender reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, and/or having government documents changed to indicate the expressed gender as fact.
There is a great deal of disagreement with this approach, however.
For example, Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has long argued against this approach, saying in one article that the basic premise that one’s sexual nature is “misaligned with one’s biological sex” is a “problematic assumption” and that “gender dysphoria — the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder.”
Furthermore, research cited by Dr. Mark Yarhouse, head of Regent University’s Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity recently cited research that a vast majority of gender dysphoria resolve on their own. In his book on the subject, he also concedes that childhood cases of the condition usually resolve before adolescence.
Likewise a 2011 study found that, “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population,” and suggests that things like sex reassignment and hormone therapy are not the best means of treating the disorder.
Finally, a recent report from the American College of Pediatricians has urged educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” and goes on to refer to the conditioning as “child abuse.” These findings run contradictory to the actions of the Obama Administration, when one takes into account the teaching power of the law — the phenomenon that governments implicitly encourage things by making them legal, a chief example of which can be seen in the widespread acceptance of divorce as a cultural norm following the introduction of no-fault divorce laws.
If your children are currently enrolled in public school, this is what the Department of Education has in store for them.
Nonetheless, the Administration has now taken a side and elected to impose both carrots and sticks for compliance and noncompliance. This will not be put up for vote by your school board and your Parent and Teacher Association has no say in the matter. Your taxes will go to support it. The Administration has told you that the science is settled; gender is based on identity, not biology and they have the power to yank your school’s federal funding if the district doesn’t play along. (For more from the author of “How Obama’s Latest Locker Room Fiat Affects Your Family” please click HERE)
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