The ACLU still wants to put boys in the girls’ locker room

It’s been almost a year since President Trump rescinded the Obama era Title IX interpretation of rules regarding “transgender kids” in schools and how privacy issues would relate to policies covering the use of bathrooms, locker rooms and showers. That threw a number of pending court challenges into the ditch and supposedly put the issue to rest. Or so I thought.

It seems that somebody at the ACLU didn’t get the message, however, and they are still pushing forward with complaints in Illinois which would force school girls to share their locker rooms with boys who “identify” as female. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is now representing a group of concerned parents and students in the case of Township High School District 211, which we’ve written about here before. They had reached a settlement in a previous case where boys “identifying” as girls could change in the girls’ locker room provided they did so behind a privacy barrier. Now, ignoring the fact that the federal guidelines have gone back to a more sanity-based position, they want to go further and remove the privacy barriers entirely. (ADF.org)

[O]n January 11, attorneys from the Thomas More Society and ADF filed a motion to intervene in another, state-court case that seeks to force the same school district to expand its policies to give members of the opposite sex completely unrestricted access to these once-private locker rooms.

There are sound, sensible reasons to keep privacy facilities separated by biological sex.

It should be no surprise that Illinois has already acknowledged the importance of privacy in its nondiscrimination law. The Illinois Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on sex and sexual orientation, among other characteristics. However, that law specifically prevents the Act from covering “‘any facility…which is distinctly private in nature such as restrooms, shower rooms, bath houses, health clubs and other similar facilities’” and allows those types of facilities to remain separate based on biological sex.

The ACLU is attempting an end run around the rules by invoking the Illinois Human Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on sex or sexual orientation. Of course, this claim falls short on two counts. As the ADF points out, that law is very specific in stating that the rule does not apply to, ‘any facility…which is distinctly private in nature such as restrooms, shower rooms, bath houses, health clubs and other similar facilities.’

Obviously, a locker room would fall under the same category, and school locker rooms are almost universally attached to shower facilities and bathrooms anyway. But even if that exclusion wasn’t included in the law, the ACLU would still have to prove that rules establishing separate, private changing facilities for boys and girls is actually discriminating when applied to members of one gender who simply believe that they are actually the other gender. To do so would be to open up a court challenge where someone would have to prove this was medically possible, and that’s a fight that transgender advocates absolutely don’t want to have because the science doesn’t exist to support such a claim.

We’re also talking about the proper relationship between the school system, the children and the parents. In any conflict over morals and the raising of children, cutting the parents out of the equation is basically the definition of an all-encompassing nanny state and the stuff of dystopian future movie scripts.

While antique concepts like common sense have largely fallen out of fashion in our courts today, shouldn’t this be one case where it could make a return even if we left all of the legalese out of the discussion? We’re talking about young school girls. Do their parents really want a boy getting undressed with them in their locker room or watching them undress? Do they want them sharing the shower? If we’re really so far gone that such a fundamental concept can’t be entertained in the courts then we’ve truly circled quite close to the drain as a society.