Judge forces high-schoolers to share showers with opposite sex
Bob Unruh
The transgender agenda in public schools, which insists a person’s sex is a subjective matter based on feelings, took a huge step forward this week with a federal judge ruling boys must be allowed to use girls’ rest rooms and showers, and vice versa.
U.S. District Court Judge Marco Hernandez in Oregon did offer an alternative, however: Parents who object to mixed-sex showers for their children can take them out of the schools for which they pay.
His ruling failed to address the fact that if they homeschool send them to a private school, as do many with such concerns, they must not only pay for their local public school but also for a second round of costs.
“It is within Parent Plaintiffs’ right to remove their children from Dallas [Oregon] High School if they disapprove of transgender student access to facilities,” the judge said.
“Once the parents have chosen to send their children to school … their liberty interest in their children’s education is severely diminished.”
His ruling, however, conflicts with President Trump’s rescinding of an Obama administration guidance letter directing schools that want to continue to receive federal funding to let transgender students use facilities that correspond with their “gender identity.”
Hernandez, who was appointed by Obama, rejected the claims from Parents for Privacy, Kris Golly, Jon Golly, Lindsey Golly, Nicole Lille, Melissa Gregory and Parents Rights in Education against the Dallas School District No. 2 and the Oregon Department of Education.
The judge previously allowed a claim for loss of companionship in a pet case to go to trial.
The underlying foundation for the argument for opening gender-specific facilities in public schools is a new interpretation of the 1972 Title IX law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. The Obama administration insisted Congress meant “gender identity” when it used the term “sex.”
The judge defined “sex” as “processes that lead to or denote male or female.”
He said such a characteristic is “assigned” at birth.
But “gender” is a person’s “subjective, deep-core sense of self as being a particular gender.”
A “transgender boy is therefore a person who has a lasting, persistent male gender identity, though that person’s sex was determined to be female at birth.”
In the Dallas district, an unidentified female student submitted such a claim to be a boy, and the school developed a plan to allow her to use the boys’ facilities.
The parents then objected.
The judge, who insisted on calling her “he,” discounted all claims the other students had to privacy, even though they, according to the judge’s ruling, say they experienced “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, intimidation, fear, apprehension and stress.”
The principal, according to the judge, “informed them that all facilities may be used by any student regardless of biological sex.”
The judge criticized Trump’s reversal of Obama’s instructions to school districts for not offering “guidance” on the issue.
The same issue is making its way through the court systems in multiple other jurisdictions, and at some point, the U.S. Supreme Court likely will be asked to step in.
In this case, the judge said, he wasn’t convinced that the students had a “fundamental right to privacy cognizable under the 14th Amendment.”
The students, he said, have no “fundamental privacy right to not share school restrooms, lockers, and showers with transgender students.”
For the school to force them to “see or be seen by someone of the opposite biological sex while either are undressing or performing bodily functions in a restroom, shower, or locker room does not give rise to a constitutional violation.”
Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com
URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2018/07/judge-forces-high-schoolers-to-share-showers-with-opposite-sex/