School staff decide what they think is safe and appropriate for students, and the perspective of those students’ parents is irrelevant.
A concerned father called in to a recent broadcast of the Rod Arquette Show Daily Rundown on Tuesday, February 2, 2021. John, from Utah County, Utah, said:
“We had an experience with our 16-year-old daughter in high school that was in the bathroom. And a couple of girls walked in with a young man and the young man said he identified as a female. And that made her really uncomfortable. We brought it up with the administration and they just said that they're following the guidelines of the district and they're doing what they're asked to do. I just feel like we're losing control of our schools.”
We couldn’t agree more with John.
His daughter’s experience is hardly novel. A parent in Virginia reported to Partners for Ethical Care (PEC) that learned that her eighth-grade daughter, who is a special-needs student with an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), had been using the boy’s restroom at school. The parent contacted the principal and expressed that her thirteen-year-old, autistic daughter should not be in the school restroom with boys.
The principal’s response? “The guidance we have from [the school district] is that students may use the bathroom of the gender for which they identify.”
In other words, school staff will decide what they think is safe and appropriate for students, and the perspective of those students’ parents is irrelevant.
Because of the Biden administration’s Executive Order “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” the message given to schools is that any boy who says he identifies as a girl should be allowed access to female-only facilities.
This Executive Order privileges one group over another. It invites boys to transgress girls’ boundaries, encourages boys to ignore girls’ consent, and is an open invitation for boys to violate girls’ safe spaces.
How many girls and women’s rights and persons will have to be violated before we say, “Enough”?
PEC is saying it right now.
Enough.
Erin Brewer & Maria Keffler are partners at Partners for Ethical Care. Contact the authors via support@partnersforethicalcare.com.