Give us some ideas. That are affordable - because individual changing rooms aren’t affordable to install when a school doesn’t have enough books to go around (my kids’ schools do not have enough books to go around - if you want to study from your Social Studies book, you need to check one out - obviously, when finals come around, not everyone can check one out, that’s the reason you have to check one out to start with.)
If the goal is an enforced 45 minute walk around the track or gym every day, they don’t need to change for that. But since they don’t have time in the school for instruction and barely have time to eat by the time they get through the lunch line, I’m not sure its the governments job to make sure that 13 year olds get in their 10,000 steps if that is the minimum requirement and rationale for PE.
No one has complained about the quality of the gender-neutral space offered to the student and I certainly have not claimed that transgender is “neither male nor female.”
Providing each individual student with a private restroom and changing area at school would be prohibitively expensive, so it would make sense for this to be decided on a case-by-case basis, which is exactly what happened and what was not good enough.
Individual changing rooms that students with specific need for them can use is not an unreasonable solution and would not require significant extra expense, provided said need was not self-determined. There are generally already similar procedures to determine who gets to use the elevator, be excused from PE class, etc.
As far as physical activity goes, giving the students choices would not cost extra. What difference does it make if someone never plays volleyball and instead prefers dance or tennis or whatever? The so-called teachers generally don’t even offer useful instruction. They should be more like personal trainers and try to facilitate a fun environment for everyone.
I disagree that either of those things would cost a reasonable amount of money. Keep in mind that the library budget for the school is $300 a year - plus whatever donations the librarian can round up - who is no longer a real librarian with an MLS, but an aide.
To complain about the quality of the space would be to miss the point entirely.
Imagine yourself as a teenaged boy/girl - either gender will do. Now imagine you’re ‘normal’*, but you have some bodily issues - maybe you’re overweight, have some weird birthmark/scarring/acne, whatever.
Now imagine that the gym teacher comes up and says ‘Your body is weird and frankly, it’s disturbing your classmates. You need to go and get changed in this private room so nobody has to see it.’
No matter how luxuriously appointed the space was, you’d most likely be incredibly humiliated and made to feel like a freak. That is exactly what’s happening here - essentially, the transgender person is being treated as something freakish that doesn’t fit in with normal societal standards.
Unfortunately, I don’t see an easy way around this that satisfies everyone, short of building individual, gender neutral changing cubicles at every school.
By ‘normal’, I mean cisgendered and heterosexual. And before anyone jumps on me, I mean that as a simple statistical fact, not a value statement.
I think this is what they must have meant 40 years ago when they talked about “future shock” - society is changing faster than society is capable of handling that change. We’re coming around to the idea that “gender” is more of a state of mind than a physical condition, but the language we use to define it, and the tropes associated with the concepts of various genders, are still tied into the terms we use to describe biological sex and the behaviors culturally associated with those sexes.
I don’t personally think there is a solution yet. As a society, we need to decide what “male” and “female” mean objectively and conclusively, what relation those concepts have to the biological sexes, and what the purpose of sex/gender-segregated lockers or bathrooms is in the context of those decisions.
And making everyone use them, so no one is accused of having a less than perfect naked body, and no one can accuse someone of having a less than perfect body when they are undressed and vulnerable. i.e. it isn’t one changing room - its 40 per gym class. Because this isn’t just a transgender kid issue, its an issue for the skinny wimpy boy who is late to hit puberty and the girl who hit puberty three years before her classmates and the obese kid, and the one with a strange scar and the geek who is perfectly normal, but picked on until he or she is riddled with self doubt, and the kid plagued with an eating disorder.
And then, because they are middle schoolers and high schoolers - you are talking private spaces where contraband can be traded and concealed, where inappropriate activity can happen outside the vision of the gym teachers - and where we hold the teachers and administrators accountable for that behavior. Middle school administrators already hate bathrooms.
Any belief that blacks and whites should be segregated in any place was rooted in ignorance and irrationality. But the belief that men and women should have separate bathrooms and locker rooms is rooted in biological fact. Racial segregation was abolished 50 years ago. Gender-segregated bathrooms remain, because there’s a reason for them.
The trouble is, some here are arguing that a girl must use the boy’s restrooms.
(i.e., they’re denying that a trans-girl is a girl at all.)
As far as that goes, at least when it comes to bathrooms – places to eliminate wastes and wash hands – an awful lot of people don’t care. I’d be just as comfortable taking a whiz or a dump if a woman was in the next stall or washing her hands at the next sink, and I know I’m not alone here. Urinal stalls have privacy screens: in my 59 years as a male, I’ve never seen another man’s penis at the next urinal.
Segregated bathrooms in secure public places – schools, sports stadiums, courtrooms, etc. – are not really necessary, most surely for “biological reasons.” There is no biological reason to segregate pissing women from pissing men.
It’s only done for social reasons…and those can be changed.
If the concern is actual harm falling to someone, I’m pretty sure making a trans girl change with the boys, is more likely to result in physical harm to someone than the reverse.
Just in case you’re more concerned with that, than ‘how it’s always been!’
They should steal space from the cheer squad or some other girly club to create another change area. Large enough to accommodate both the trans girl and any female students willing to brave changing with her. (I’m betting, there’s a few!) When students in the new space outnumber those in the old space, they switch!
I’ve been in my share of non-gender segregated bathrooms - not uncommon in bars to have one bathroom with many stalls. It isn’t a huge deal - as long as there are individual stalls, and as long as the bathroom is busy enough to create a feeling of safety.
But we aren’t talking about adults and we aren’t talking about stalled bathrooms - we are talking about open locker rooms and human beings in their larval stage.
Your school has separate spaces for a girly club? Our cheerleaders use the girls locker room. Our girls sports teams use the girls locker room. Our drama kids use dressing rooms - segregated by gender - but half a school away from the gym. I’m not sure where you could carve out a separate space when remedial math tutoring is being done in an old custodial closet.
Maybe I’m just dense, but I don’t understand why there’s a need for them.
Never in all my years on earth have I ever gone into a public bathroom and see bare breastses, vaginas, or bare asses. And no one has seen mine either because I make sure the stall door is closed before I started undressing myself. My mama taught me this.
I know guys have to remember to zip themselves back up. And some guys–whether out of medical necessity or preference–pull their pants down so that their bare backsides show. But a stall door would take care of this right nicely. There doesn’t have to be any exposure of genitalia in a public restroom.
So I think the reason we still conform to this practice is because we’re prudish people who’ve been conditioned to think (and fear) sex all the time. There’s nothing “biological” about the separation.
I think if we didn’t engage in this senseless practice, these young women would have a much harder time justifying why they think their fears are sufficient cause to discriminate against someone.
Communal changing rooms seem as antiquated in school as communal showers. Just put in stalls. It’s not like anyone likes to be seen naked anymore, anyways–especially not developing teens. Hell, because our bathrooms never had stall doors, I avoided them in high school, and I wasn’t alone.
But, yes, if you feel uncomfortable around trans people, that is bigotry, and, no, policy does not cater to bigotry. Yes, you might be a good person. It may be latent bigotry that you are trying to overcome. But having policy that allows you to discriminate is not going to fix that, now is it?
And, yes, the issue that allowed for segregated bathrooms is already outdated, since it was about people ogling others, and we’ve known about homosexuality for a while. Apparently, it’s no longer a big enough concern that people care, or we’d have bathrooms like other countries with stalls you can’t see over.
So it’s obvious that caring about trans people when you don’t care about gay people is just transphobia. Maybe it’s the innocent kind you just need to work and get over, but it’s still transphobia. And it should not be tolerated.
If that makes you uncomfortable, that’s just something about yourself you need to fix.
Apparently the school in question could afford the extra private changing room, since they were already doing it.
And why is letting students choose which sport to do going to cost extra? I went to a relatively large high school, but at any class hour there was a PE class doing one of dozens of sports, yet each class had to rotate through every sport by doing a particular one at a time. For a student to decline tennis and head instead to the gym for basketball would have been free.
It isn’t JUST bigotry we have to get over. Its also us as a culture wanting to protect our children from “sex.” Many teenage girls have never seen a penis in real life, and their parents don’t want them seeing a penis, no matter if the person possessing that penis is a girl. And some parents feel similarly about their teenage boys - even if the breasts and mons in question is owned by a boy . This is a culture where rolling a condom over a banana or showing drawings of naked people in sex ed is controversial - and we haven’t gotten over that despite time. Now you want a real naked biological male in a girls locker room showering with the girls. That just isn’t going to go over.
And my kids still have communal showers - its all hanging out.
You are talking policy - not one school - this is a decision that will have to be handled over and over again.
My kids school has no private dressing areas, communal showers, and no alternative changing space. They have three PE classes at a time - but are sharing a gym in Minnesota, they all need to do the same sport, there isn’t additional space for them to do anything else.
Except nothing like that happened.
The student complained about not wanting to use the boys’ facility, so was given access to a private gender-neutral faculty bathroom. Last year that was fine, but this year, extra attention was needed, so the student decided the girls’ facility was necessary. Girls were uncomfortable and complained.
You can’t use the word “normal” to mean cisgender and heterosexual then turn around and whine about a transgender person being “treated as something freakish that doesn’t fit in with normal societal standards.” Your disclaimer applies to both instances and you are correct: a transgender person is, statistically speaking and not as a value judgment, not “normal.” When someone is different from the vast majority of the population, sometimes providing different accommodations is the best answer we have.
The children at the school in question have most likely been told since they were toddlers that there are two kinds of people, boys and girls. By age 4 or 5, nearly all “knew” that a boy has boy private parts and a girl has girl private parts and that these parts were not to be displayed to people that did not have similar parts. They “knew” that they were to use the restroom with the appropriate picture/word and that in that restroom they should expect to find only people with similar private parts. No one meant any harm in teaching them these rules to follow. It was normal.
Now suddenly they are expected to welcome someone with different private parts into their specially designated changing area. They are supposed to undress in front of the person and behave as if nothing worth noting is going on while the person changes in front of them, and if they don’t go along with this without complaint, they are considered bigots. Their feelings don’t count or matter. Only the bepenised individual with a bad wig’s feelings are to be taken into consideration.
Should we do away with gender-specific changing rooms? Maybe, but it should come as no great shock that people are reluctant to throw out the status quo when they’ve been told their entire lives that this is the correct and proper way for things to be: that when someone with different private parts is around, you are supposed to keep your clothes on and so are they.
Catching up on this thread today. Habeed makes me grind my teeth and want to bang my head against the wall. Those of you who tried (unsuccessfully, I think) to get through to him - thanks. Great effort.