Imagine being a menstruating teenage girl attending to your private business in a restroom, only to look up and see a boy’s eye peering in at you through the crack in the stall door. This happened in an Ottawa County High School. Jenison, Zeeland, and Allendale public schools have all fielded complaints from parents regarding biological males who identify as transgender using the girl’s restroom and/or biological females who identify as transgender using the boy’s restroom. Some districts have this happening at middle schools as well.
According to school attorneys, if students “identify as” the opposite sex, they must be allowed to use the bathroom of the opposite sex. School districts have to meet the needs of all of their students. The Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Act of 1976 protects people from discrimination. In March 2023 Michigan legislatures expanded the Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Act to include discrimination of both sexual orientation and gender identity. This means that because of the expansion of the Elliott Larsen Act to include gender identity, the school district cannot stop “transgenders” from using the restroom of their “identity.” Transgenders are now a protected class and it would be a violation of “their” civil rights.
This is not only happening in west Michigan. It is commonplace all over the country. By now, most everyone has heard of Riley Gains, the university swimmer who was forced to share a locker room with trans swimmer Lia Thomas in order to compete. Here’s a similar incident that happened in Wisconsin, but at the high-school level: 18 year old biological male, who identified as “trans,” entered the Sun Prairie high school locker room and showered naked next to four freshmen girls. The biological male exposed his male genitalia to the shocked and horrified 14-year-old girls.
The state of Kansas may have found a solution to this issue. They passed a law that defines a person’s sex at birth and is designed to keep boys out of girl’s private spaces and vice versa. The state of Michigan currently offers no similar solution. Therefore, Jenison Public Schools is looking at possibly remodeling community restrooms into single stalls. School districts can ask transgender students to use the single stall restrooms, but cannot force them to do so because that would single them out and discriminate against them violating the Elliot Larsen Act.
Ironically, if a boy comes into the girl’s bathroom who does NOT identify as transgender, school officials can take action. However, because the claim of gender fluidity is embraced, a boy could identify as a girl for the purpose of using the bathroom and then identify as a boy afterward. Theatrically, he could even identify as a girl on days when he has gym, to get in the locker rooms with girls, then identify as a boy on other days.
Sadly, no improvement in the situation is likely to occur until a case reaches the Supreme Court, striking down existing laws. School district employees and school board members could choose to stand against the current laws, most likely resulting in a lawsuit. Parents could file a lawsuit. Perhaps large groups of citizens will band together to demand girls and boys have a fundamental right to privacy?
As citizens, we need to ask ourselves and our elected leaders to consider the possible unintended abuses of poorly written laws. By allowing students to identify their sex based on thoughts and imagination rather than objective physical traits, we are incentivizing bad actors to indulge their lewd behaviors because they face no accountability. After all, we’ve invented a new protected class.