Three students who claim to be transgender have banded together to sue their Pittsburgh-area school district after it reopened privacy-protecting single-sex bathrooms for boys and girls.
Jacob Evancho, whose transgender name is Juliet; Erik Ridenour, who wants to be called Elissa; and another student identified only as A.S. have sued the Pine-Richland School District over its September resolution to reject transgender policies — such as dual-sex bathrooms — in district schools, according to ChristianNews.com.
In August, the district, situated north of Pittsburgh, decided to end its new policy of allowing students to choose whatever bathroom they want to use at any given time, but also to reestablished the use of single-sex, privacy protecting bathrooms for boys and girls. The policy compromise also allows some dual-sex bathrooms for students who say they are transgender.
“This resolution agreed to by a majority of the board of directors of the Pine-Richland School District indicates our support to return to the long-standing practice of providing sex-specific facility usage,” said the resolution, passed in a 5-4 decision. “All students will have the choice of using either the facilities that correspond to their biological sex or [to] unisex facilities. This practice will remain in place until such time that a policy may be developed and approved.”
But the three students and their lawyer insist that the new compromise resolution violates both Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The students object to the compromise creation of some dual-sex bathrooms. That’s because they want the school officials — plus the teachers and students and parents — to officially endorse their claims to have switched gender. That endorsement would be delivered when school officials agree to let the few transgender students use bathrooms designated for the opposite sex, regardless of opposition from normal students.
Attorney Omar Gonzalez-Pagan said the students “want to be able to graduate from Pine-Richland knowing the school recognized and respected who they are.”
“Forcing them to use restrooms that do match their identity erases students’ gender identity, endangers the health and safety of transgender students and isolates them from the entire student body and at the same time violates their privacy,” the attorney claimed.
Earlier in the year, the Obama administration essentially used a backdoor method to force all public schools to change many school rules to allow transgender students to choose their own bathrooms and locker rooms. That policy echoes the far-left “gender ideology,” which insists that government should force Americans to accept claims by individuals who say their gender is different from their male or female biology.
Predicated on Title IX, President Barack Obama issued a May decree that schools must welcome a tiny number of purportedly transgender children by taking single-sex bathrooms, single-sex locker rooms, and sexual privacy away from almost 55 million American kids in 100,000 K-12 public schools across the nation. “There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” activist U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement at the time.
Of course, this Pittsburgh-area district is far from the only school district grappling with the transgender ideology. Earlier this year, students in Vermont and Missouri rebelled against decisions by their school administrators to allow transgender students to choose whichever bathroom they feel like using.
Some religious-based schools have also filed suit in federal court to stop the government from forcing them to accept transgenderism in violation of the separation of church and state and religious freedom.
In addition, over a dozen states have gathered together to join a federal lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General against the Obama administration’s Title IX demands.
In their lawsuit, the combined states insist that “Neither the text nor the legislative history of Title IX supports an interpretation of the term ‘sex’ as meaning anything other than one’s sex as determined by anatomy and genetics.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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