Kansas is set to become the twelfth state to sue President Barack Obama’s administration over the President’s decree that 100,000 public schools must force their 55 million K-12 kids to give up sexual privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms just to validate the feelings of a tiny percentage of youths who think they belong to the other sex.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt announced on Wednesday that the state intended to challenge Obama’s authority to force Kansas to obey his transgender bathroom decree. Sunflower State officials are mulling whether they will join the eleven-state suit spearheaded by Texas or whether they will bring their own, separate suit.
In his statement, AG Schmidt said the move was spurred by a federal appeals court’s decision to force a school district to acquiesce to the demands made by a girl who claims to have a male “gender identity” and so is entitled to use the boys’ single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms in a Gloucester, Virginia, high school. The court insisted federal Title IX education funding laws could be used as a basis to force all schools in the nation to submit to Obama’s unpopular pro-transgender demands.
“I had hoped the Virginia case could quickly resolve this issue by confirming the longstanding traditional understanding that Title IX applies to biological sex, not [to] gender identity,” Schmidt said. “But today’s refusal by the appeals court in Virginia to reconsider its earlier flawed decision means our only option is to pursue a more direct challenge to the Obama administration’s unlawful efforts to unilaterally rewrite Title IX.”
“The bottom line is that Kansas will challenge the Obama administration’s attempt to unilaterally rewrite Title IX [law] in an unprecedented way that further expands federal power,” Schmidt added.
In our federal system of government, not every decision needs to be handed down from Washington, and this is a matter best left to state or local authorities, including school boards, as it traditionally has been – and as the law requires.
A recent poll showed that roughly two out of three Americans prefer that bathroom policies be set by state or local officials, not by the central government. Other polls show the public strongly opposes the removal of single-sex bathrooms for K-12 schools. A study of the 2010 census showed that only one out of every 2,400 adults have changed their names to the opposite sex.
Schmidt also noted that state officials have not yet decided if they intend to join the suit already filed by Texas.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on May 25 that the Lone Star State was suing the Obama administration to put an end to the administration’s plans to force every school in the country to implement a pro-transgender policy. Ten other states joined Texas in its suit.
These states were driven to legal action when on May 13, the Department of Education (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and the Department of Justice (DOJ) Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, sent a “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students” to state and local agencies that receive federal financial assistance from the DOE. The policy prescription in the letter allows students to use bathroom and other facilities that they “gender identify” with at any given moment. A head of the Office of Civil Rights in the DOE thus joined with the White House legal arm, the DOJ, in sending the letter which they insisted should serve as “significant guidance” on how schools must handle the issue.
The documents also list a variety of ways in which schools should enforce the transgender ideology. These include federal instructions that schools not tell parents that school officials are helping their child experiment with transgender sexual attitudes, and an instruction that teachers force kids to use a new language created to validate transgender claims.
In general, the transgender ideology says the state should require every American to validate every person’s choice of created “gender identity,” even though a man who wants to be a woman is still a man by every known scientific measure of evolutionary life. For example, an Oregon law recently allowed a jury to award $60,00 t0 a transgender teacher because other teachers declined to use the teacher’s preferred pronoun, which is “they” rather than “him” or “her.” New York City has also establish similar forced-speech rules.
The ideology’s claim that the state must enforce a new right to “gender identity” also means that the state must ignore and often dismantle many civic rules that evolved to help the two distinct sexes — men and boys, women and girls — meet their legally equal, but different and complementary, needs. For example, the transgender ideological demand means that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms must opened up to people of the opposite sex, regardless of age, and without any verification of created “gender identity.”
As a result, it is now an offense in Washington State to ask a man in a woman’s bathroom if he thinks he is male or female. Similarly, Obama and gay advocacy groups have slammed a popular North Carolina law, dubbed HB2, because it requires people to undergo medical procedures before they can use a bathroom reserved for the opposite sex.
The Kansas Senate applauded the state AG’s announcement while making its own show of condemnation of the President’s actions with a 30-8 vote on a non-binding resolution.
Senate Republican Majority Leader Terry Bruce said Obama “overstepped his bounds” by making such demands and summarily taking power away from local school districts to make their own decisions.”I think that it’s a distraction for the federal government to do it and it’s also unconstitutional,” Bruce said on Wednesday. Bruce and many of his Senate colleagues also felt that Obama’s move was unconstitutional.
Republican Sen. Steve Fitzgerald added that people who feel they are transgender are mentally troubled. “I’m not surprised that those who are confused about their sex have a high rate of suicide,” Fitzgerald exclaimed. “Suicide does have a high rate with those are afflicted with some form of insanity.”
Indeed, some medical experts agree that people with what some call “gender dysphoria” have severe mental challenges, not real, physical disorders. For example, the American College of Pediatrics has ruled that forcing transgenderism on kids is akin to child abuse.
Warning that forcing “a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex” on kids is dangerous for them, the ACP also insisted gender is a matter of concrete biological fact, not created feelings.
The group released a statement in March saying in part, “human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: ‘XY’ and ‘XX’ are genetic markers of health–not genetic markers of a disorder.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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