From how some school boards push for trans rights, you’d think “girls don’t mind” when a boy shows up in their bathroom. They just come to see him as “one of the girls.”
But in Pennsylvania’s Perkiomen Valley School District, kids were pretty upset when they learned their school allowed boys in the girls’ bathroom. Not long ago, a transgender teen entered the girls’ restroom in a Loudon County high school to assault a female student there, in a story that made national news. In the Perkiomen Valley district, girls understandably felt threatened. They expected the adults on the school board to protect them.
And when those adults failed to do so at a meeting this past September, students took matters into their own hands and organized a walkout in protest.
It worked. After weeks of public pressure from both parents and students, on Monday, the school passed a policy requiring students to use bathrooms based on their actual biological gender, not the gender they identify with.
Parents’ rights advocates cheered the vote as a victory in a battle led by the students themselves. It’s a “win for reality and a win for the girls who will no longer have to share their bathrooms with biological males!” Gays Against Groomers tweeted/posted:
And Tim Jagger, the parent who kicked off the protest over the prior policy after his daughter allegedly encountered a boy in the girls’ bathroom, told Fox News the students’ role in getting the school board’s vote was “huge.”
Of course, not everyone cheered. Trans rights advocates like Ashli Giles-Perkins, attorney for the Education Law Center, clutched their pearls. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer :
She is “appalled that districts like Perkiomen Valley have adopted discriminatory policies aimed squarely at trans and nonbinary students.”Giles-Perkins called on the district to reverse its policy and also urged the Pennsylvania Department of Education to issue “long-overdue guidance that reflects federal guidelines to protect, not cause additional harm to, transgender and nonbinary youth.”
It’s not clear what that “harm” is, though. As one of the school board members explained to WFMZ News, the new policy strikes a compromise by opening up previously unavailable teachers’ bathrooms to students. These “single-user” facilities can be locked and used by “any student who has a need or desire for increased privacy, regardless of the underlying reason” under the new rules. So now there are actually more single-use bathrooms for trans students—and they are open to all.
As one of the policy’s supporters at the meeting urged the school board: “We need to come together again for the kids … There’s a commonsense solution on the table, and that is for transgender students to use the single-stall bathrooms. This does the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest amount of time.”
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