51
votes
High school administrators trapped a student in a Kafkaesque nightmare. They gave her the option of being suspended or face the threat of rape and assault. Her family is now suing the school district.
Link information
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- Title
- Lawsuit: Trans student was denied use of girls' restroom at Platte County High, subject to verbal harassment
- Published
- Aug 3 2023
- Word count
- 278 words
A high school in Missouri disciplined and eventually suspended a trans girl student for using the girl's restroom. This student is a minor trans girl who is has gone through a long transition process including years of therapy, name change, clothing changes, and hormone therapy. Administrators insisted she use the male restroom or a single-stall restroom, citing non-existent state laws requiring them to do so. They subjected her to detention on multiple occasions and eventually suspended her for using the women's restroom.
The school had a small number of single-gender restrooms, but they were inconveniently placed. The school also did nothing to ensure that only those who really needed them had access to them, resulting in long lines. It was simply not physically possible for her to use the single-stall restroom between classes while also arriving in time for class. The school refused to give her any accommodation or leniency on tardiness rules that would be needed for her to use the single-gender restrooms the school provided. It was not possible for her to use the single-stall restroom without getting in trouble for being late to class. This forced her to use the male restroom.
When using the male restroom, she was threatened with assault and rape by male students, and faced constant bullying. The school administrators were informed of this, and they did nothing to stop it. She faced detention and suspension simply for using the girl's restroom; there were no allegations of misconduct or inappropriate behavior she made while doing so. She was faced with suspension for simply using the restroom. Meanwhile, male students bullying her and threatening to commit horrific crimes against her. The male students committed literal felonies (threatening to rape or assault someone), and they faced zero consequences.
Her family was forced to flee the district and are now suing the school, supported by the local ACLU.
This sort of thing goes far beyond just high schools. This shows the real malignancy behind attempts to legally mandate trans people use one restroom or another. The goal is to make it so trans people are easily identified in public so they can be subject to bullying, assault, rape, and murder. Laws that attempt to regulate what restrooms trans people use never also attempt to apply severe criminal penalties to people who bully or threaten trans people for using the restrooms the laws require them to use. Police are typically extremely transphobic, and they will generally refuse to prosecute assaults against trans people. If a trans person calls police to report being assaulted for using a restroom the law requires them to, the police are most likely to arrest the trans person, not the person that assaults them.
I almost hesitated to say this, because it is a very serious accusation, but this does smack of the "separate but equal" accommodations that were used to enforce racism in America for so long.
The comparison is pretty apt. In theory, if the Jim Crow South had actually made a real effort to make segregated spaces truly equal, they might never have been struck down. But in practice, the kind of person that wants to keep people of different races from living together isn't the kind of person who cares a lot about racial equity. Southern towns would put together some shoe-string, incredibly shitty version of the infrastructure they offered for white people, slap a "black people only" sign on it, and declare things separate and equal. Hell, if they really wanted to protect their ability to segregate, they should have made the minority version of everything superior to that of the white version. That way they could have at least said, "we're actually giving the minority population better resources!" Maybe spend 20% more per pupil for the school the black students were forced to go to. Make the pool reserved for black people better than that reserved for white people. Etc. It would still have been incredibly dehumanizing to those forced into the minority school and other public places, but at least they would get some benefit from it. If the Jim Crow states had taken that approach, it's quite possible they could have kept things segregated indefinitely. But of course, they didn't. They woefully underfunded the black schools. Their claims of "separate but equal" were lies from the start.
And the comparison is not inappropriately applied to how some schools try to handle trans students. Some people feel irrationally uncomfortable sharing a space with trans students. The schools can't just outright ban trans kids from attending, so they offer them a fig leaf of an alternate option. The white population of Jim Crow states felt uncomfortable sharing spaces with black people. They couldn't just refuse to provide schools for black students, so they offered a cheap, shitty, separate option and declared the issue resolved.
This seems exactly what they did here. They put in one or two "all gender restrooms" and called it a day. They made no attempt to assure that this actually met the needs of trans students or gave them equal access to restrooms as their cisgender peers. And remember, all of this was done purely to not make cisgender students uncomfortable. This girl was perfectly happy to use the regular women's restroom, not requiring any special accommodation by the school. It would cost the school absolutely nothing to simply let this girl use the restroom that reflects her identity, dress, legal name, etc. Even if building a bunch of single-stall restrooms would have been too expensive, they could have at least restricted who can use them or give students that use them some extra time in passing period. It turns out the kind of person who wants to keep a trans girl from using the girls bathroom isn't the kind of person who will make sure a safe and effective alternative exists.
Would it be in some way unfair to have nice single-user restrooms conveniently placed that only trans kids can use? In some sense, yes. Those kids might very well enjoy on average cleaner and more spacious restrooms than the cis kids have. But if you are that damn set on preventing trans people from using the restroom of their identified gender, then the onus is on YOU to provide that alternative. Don't want to spend the money to build them or put in the effort to make sure only those who need them have access? Well too fucking bad! You're the one creating this mess in the first place, instead of simply allowing the kid to use the restroom she would prefer.
I don't remember where I saw this story but I read a story about the segregated south. A white person was complaining that the schools provided for blacks were inadaquate. The rebuttal was that the schools are just as good. So the complainer said ok, lets switch buildings and equipment and books, let the black kids attend the white facilities and vice versa. At which point they were called a trouble maker and the conversation was over. The people who do this absolutely know that they are not being fair. They just don't want to say it outloud.
Your points are all excellent and you articulated it better than I could have.
I hesitated to say it because I do think we rush to over sensationalize things these days, but the comparison is apt. Let's just hope the end result isn't the same.
Did nothing to stop it because this is the intended effect. Shit like this to force people back into the closet. It's hate, pure and simple.
So... The girls ratted her out every time she used the ladies. What a lovely school. Positively charming.
It wasn't even necessarily that. I didn't see anything about other students ratting her out for using the girl's restroom. It sounded like it was just the school administrators, who knew of her trans status from her records, that were harassing and disciplining her. The lawsuit they filed states the district has some policy requiring students use restrooms based on sex assigned at birth. It's possible she was ratted out by other students, but the complaint makes no mention of such that I can find. It's possible she was, but it's also possible she was just bullied by the administrators. The complaint is included in this story here (which is linked in the posted link):
https://www.kctv5.com/2023/08/01/transgender-student-was-denied-use-girls-restroom-platte-county-high-school-lawsuit-states/
My high school (which was TINY -- less than 200 students) had security cameras outside the entrances to the restrooms. And this was before the trans panic was much of a thing. So it wouldn't surprise me if a much larger public school like this also had security cameras placed to see who entered which restrooms. Given their clear targeting of this girl, it's possible they didn't even need other students to rat her out and were just deliberately overly vigilant about her bathroom usage.
I went to a high school famous for its arts programs. It was still a public school and since most of the kids in the arts programs were mostly queer, we had a large, and very active "Rainbow Ally" group. We also had a very large population of kids from the worse parts of town in our school, it was very 50/50 affluent and very poor, and it was very intermixed with who valued education and who didnt. I don't know anyone that ratted anyone else out for being lgbt, or had issues with trans kids using their preferred bathrooms. This was in the early 2000's. Now it seems like schools care way too much, but I would like to think that if we had this kind of insanity at our school, the kids would band together and walk their trans (or nonbinary, etc) friends to and from the bathrooms to protect them.
This was also in a very liberal area in California, so I don't think it ever would have been an issue, but the kids threatening this girl should be punished as well as the district administrators fired and prosecuted as well.
I went to a conservative Christian private school in Ohio, and a friend of mine was "asked not to come back" after it came out he was gay. So not a very accepting environment to say the least. But even so I can't imagine even the worst kids threatening anyone the way this girl was threatened. Maybe that's me not being cynical enough, idk, but I absolutely agree that the students threatening her like this should be severely punished.