Supreme Court rejects case on transgender bathrooms. Here’s why it’s still a huge issue.

By Monica Burke | The Daily Signal

The Supreme Court rejected a case regarding school policy in a district which allows transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied cert to Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, a case concerning a gender identity bathroom and locker room policy at a Pennsylvania high school.

In declining to take up the case, The Supreme Court let stand the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit’s decision, which dismissed the concerns of students who did not wish to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex.

Public domain

Everyone deserves privacy and safety in private facilities. However, one-size-fits-all policies like Boyertown’s fail to take into account the very real needs of countless girls.

As long as this policy remains in place, the problems with the policy remain too. High school girls like Alexis Lightcap will continue to have to share women’s spaces with biological males.

“I don’t want a man in the bathroom with me. I’m already uncomfortable in my body, trying to grow up,” said Lightcap.  “I have a thirteen-year-old sister who goes to this school. I don’t want her going into a bathroom where a male is allowed to just walk in there.”

“I wish that the school had protected my privacy somehow. It felt like a specific group of people were protected while the greater population was not,” Lightcap said.

Policies like the one at Boyertown Area School District leaves girls vulnerable to emotional trauma–or worse. At a school in Decatur, Georgia, a gender identity bathroom policy similar to the one at Boyertown enabled a boy who identifies as gender fluid to sexually assault a kindergarten girl.

Girls deserve to feel safe and have privacy in women’s only spaces.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood this. When she penned the majority opinion requiring Virginia Military Institute to admit women, she stipulated that VMI would need to “afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex in living arrangements.”

Why? As she wrote in an op-ed at The Washington Post while she was a law professor at Columbia, “Separate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy. Individual privacy, a right of constitutional dimension, is appropriately harmonized with the equality principle.”

Privacy and equality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, upholding the former is essential to preserving the latter—especially for women.

The #MeToo movement is a prescient reminder that women still face unique social challenges. Taking away women’s privacy from the male form and the male gaze directly by forcing them to share spaces with males is a step backwards in the fight for equality.

This problem is not going anywhere. As Ginsburg pointed out in her VMI opinion, “[p]hysical differences between the sexes are enduring,” and quoting Ballard v. United States, “[t]he two sexes are not fungible.”

The difference between the sexes is here to stay; so too are the problems with gender identity policies like the one at Boyertown.

Everyone deserves privacy and safety in private facilities. However, one-size-fits-all policies like Boyertown’s fail to take into account the very real needs of countless girls.

Better solutions exist. In the absence of a Supreme Court decision, it is on school administrators to find them.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/tedeytan and Public domain

2 thoughts on “Supreme Court rejects case on transgender bathrooms. Here’s why it’s still a huge issue.

  1. Truly one of the sign posts along the Left’s road to moral degradation. This is one of the best examples of why parents should receive vouchers to send their children to private schools. Tennessee just enacted such legislation. As the lines continue to be drawn between immoral liberal/socialist ideology and conservatism, the geographical realignment of the population continues.

  2. Believe it or not, all this is planned and executed on purpose. It’s whole point is to create confusion, division, hate. How’s the plan working so far?

    It’s all in the book/videos, there are a couple sources.

    See if you shift the basic, fundamental human experience to something it’s not, you create chaos. From that chaos, comes a new form of government to save the day, it’s all planned out. We go from a constitutional republic, to a democracy, to an Oligarchy.

    Democracies are ALWAYS a transitional government.

    It’s why our founding fathers avoided it like the true plague it is. It’s also why those who are not defending our constitution always refer to us a Democracy, it’s not a mistake. When you have “constitutional scholars” saying we need to defend out “democracy”….it’s not a mistake. It’s why many are saying, get rid of the electoral college and get to a “true democracy”, though most are doing it because they don’t’ even know better, they are just repeating what all their friends are saying.

    They have us fighting over the difference between a man and woman, don’t underestimate the power of propaganda a poor education. They’re telling me I can can be female. Huh….and if I say otherwise, clearly I’m misogynistic, racist and sexist. Yeah, propaganda is powerful.

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