2014 – Week of December 15 – #1076
Earlier this month news out of Maine reported that a court has ordered that a school district pay $75,000 to the lawyers who represented a transgendered young person and his parents.
According to the online report, Wyatt Maines, has “identified as a girl since as early as age 2.”[1] School officials became aware of Wyatt’s “identification” issue when he was in third grade and began referring to him as Nicole. Wyatt used at that time the single-person restroom facilities in the elementary school.
In fourth grade, Wyatt was, again, according to the report “dressing and appearing exclusively as a girl,” and in 5th grade was allowed to use the communal girls’ restroom. And that’s when things got even more interesting. Mind you, none of the reports I have seen indicate that Wyatt had any gender-change surgeries or was on any testosterone suppression therapies.
One day in his 5th grade year back in 2007, Wyatt went into the communal girls’ restroom and another boy twice followed Wyatt into the girls’ restroom, claiming that if Wyatt could go in there, so could he. At that point, school officials changed their mind and told Wyatt that he could no longer use the girls’ restroom. Wyatt’s family sued the school district for “refusing access by transgender students to school restrooms that are consistent with their gender identity.”[2]
The lower court agreed with the school district’s policy, but the family appealed to Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court which earlier this year overruled the lower court’s decision and sided with Wyatt and her family.
Now, let me be perfectly clear: this is idiocy. Maine’s high court is wrong. There is no law that requires any school district to let boys use the girls’ restrooms or girls to use the boys’ restrooms. None. Nevertheless, this activist court has established a very dangerous and damaging precedent. School districts all across the country will see this as a clear signal that they must have transgender and gender-identity policies that allow students who “identify with” the gender other than their biological gender to use restrooms, locker rooms, showers, whatever, that are “consistent with their gender identity.”
We’re dealing with this issue in several school districts right here in Wisconsin. I can hear the talk among these school board members right now. “See. We have to do this; we’re going to be sued if we don’t. The last thing we want is a high-profile lawsuit. Let’s pass a policy and implement right now!”
For a court to make this kind of addle-brained decision it has to be completely besotted with pushing the homosexual agenda which has always been about providing, not equal, but special protections and benefits for a very select minority of people, to the very real detriment of the majority.
In the case of schools, at a minimum the right to privacy of the 99.7% of students who don’t struggle with gender identity issues is compromised—and it may end up being that their safety is at risk. School boards need to think about lawsuits in the other direction—from those parents whose children are harmed in some way by allowing transgendered students to use the restrooms of the gender with which they identify.
Note that Wyatt dressed and acted like a girl, but biologically and anatomically he was and is a boy. His chromosomes are X and Y. All the courts are relying on is this boy’s very subjective testimony and his dressing and actions. Of course, some psychologist or even a psychiatrist has no doubt weighed in; and I’m sure his parents have made statements such as “we’ve just always known he was really a girl.” There’s no amount of surgeries or therapies that will fundamentally alter someone’s biological gender.
We’ve always had people who have had some issues with gender identity. The difference is we didn’t destroy the law and jeopardize others—the vast majority—to accommodate them. Making sweeping law based on exceptions, and very small exceptions at that, is not just wrong; it could be downright dangerous. Wisconsin school boards need to listen to the common sense arguments constituents are making and do the right thing on behalf of all the students.
This is Julaine Appling for Wisconsin Family Council reminding you the prophet Hosea said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
[1] http://www.pressherald.com/2014/12/02/transgender-girl-awarded-75000-in-lawsuit-over-orono-school-bathroom-access/, accessed 12/15/2014
[2] Ibid.
