Right Takes Aim at Maine Proposal for Trans Restroom Use

Elements of the social and religious right have targeted a Maine proposal to allow transgendered students to use the facilities appropriate to the gender with which the students identify.

The Maine Human Rights Commission has taken up the question of whether the issue of which restroom transgender students may use falls under the rubric of existing anti-discrimination laws. On March 1, the Commission voted to open the deliberation to public input, according to a March 2 article in local newspaper the Kennebec Journal.

The question is part of a larger set of standards that the Commission had been developing for use by the state's schools, in order to ensure that GLBT students, teachers, and staff do not suffer discrimination.

Religious conservatives say that restroom policy should be guided by the biological gender of the people using the facilities, and call for guidelines that establish the use of "biology based bathrooms," such that individuals with male physiology would be barred form using women's restrooms and locker rooms--even if the individual's gender identification is at odds with his or her physiology.

Transgender individuals often express a persistent, deep-rooted conviction that they are actually people of the opposite sex from an early age, despite their physical gender. Young transgender boys will insist on dressing as girls, being treated as girls, and playing with toys traditionally associated with girls; transgender girls express similar convictions indicating that they view themselves as male. Many transgender people live and dress as the gender with which they identify; some individuals opt for gender reassignment surgery, and say that once the surgery is complete, they feel at home in their bodies for the first time in their lives.

The policy under consideration in Maine might encourage schools not only to allow transgender students to use the facilities according to their gender identity, rather than their physiology, but also to allow transgender students to compete on gender-appropriate athletic teams based on gender identity.

Conservatives opposed to these measures say that abuses would inevitably occur, with male sexual predators taking advantage of such accommodations to sneak into facilities for females. "There was a time when boys of easy virtue had to content themselves with sneaking a peek at the girls' swim team during practice. But social engineers may make this pass� with a proposal to allow boys to use girls' bathrooms and locker rooms," began an op-ed by Selwyn Duke on the Maine proposal posted at conservative website New American on March 7. The story referenced an earlier item posted at anti-gay religious website WorldNetDaily that reported on a transgender student in Maine having been given permission to use the girls' restroom.

Duke's opinion piece also referred to South African athlete Caster Semenya and to stories of young transgender children in other countries who have been allowed to attend school dressed in the attire of the gender with which they identify. "Feelings have been made the arbiter here, as one's perception is simply what he feels he is," wrote Duke, going on to compare gender identity with cases in which individuals have been convinced that certain body parts should not be part of their physiology, and with people who identify as animals other than human beings. "So you can just imagine the creative genders people can fancy themselves to be," Duke continued. "And the gender agenda has been translated into policy. There are numerous governments--local, state, and even national--that have made gender a 'protected' (read: specially favored) category under hate-crime and anti-discrimination laws."

An Effort to Repeal Maine's Human Rights Laws

WorldNetDaily also followed up with stories, one from March 2 that said that "pro-family activists" were using the issue as a springboard to launch an effort aimed at repealing Maine's human rights laws. The article quoted the Maine Grassroots Coalition's Paul Madore, who dismissed the guidelines being considered by the Human Rights Commission as the work of "radical homosexual organizations." Said Madore, "The commission sought the input of these radical homosexual groups on purpose and there was no impartial and objective source of information."

The site said that one of the commission's own members, Kenneth Fredette, expressed doubts about allowing transgender students to use the restrooms that they might personally be comfortable with, at the expense of others who also use the facilities. "The consequence is to be borne by other people who are in the bathroom," Fredette was quoted as saying. "My daughter might be shocked by the experience of having someone who is biologically a male come into the bathroom while she is in the process of using the bathroom," Fredette added, going on to say, "I don't know how that will affect her and I don't think we need to be putting students at risk for that kind of a situation."

A March 1 article at the site claimed that, "the guidelines were developed in large part at a Dec. 15 meeting to which homosexual activists were invited but not opponents of the plan," going on to say that although legal equality group Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders attended, along with safe schools advocacy group the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, anti-gay organizations such as the Maine Family Policy Council were left out.

"Has the commission met its obligation to seek citizen input?" the March 1 article quoted Fredette as saying. "Has the commission designed a system of due process that protects civil liberties? Has the commission acted in its delegated authority given to it by the authority?" Added Fredette, "Now I condemn those who would threaten or bully those who identify themselves as transgendered. Their liberties are important too. We should protect those citizens too.

"I urge the commission to face this issue in a public and open manner and to not issue the proposed guidelines because we have not acted in an open and public manner," Fredette continued. "We don't have to issue guidance. That's the legislature's authority."

Reducing General GLBT Concerns to Trans Restroom Use

Another perspective was set forth by Ed Brayton in an op-ed posted at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Brayton noted that GLBT issues were being routinely reduced by opponents of equality to questions of restroom use by transgender people.

"We know this is a national strategy because we've seen the same pamphlets and commercials show up in city after city, from Gainesville, Florida to Kalamazoo, Michigan," Brayton wrote. "One famous one showed a shifty-looking man looking vaguely evil as he follows a little girl into a girl's bathroom, presumably to do something evil to them.

"None of this is reality, of course," Brayton continued. "There isn't a single documented case anywhere in the nation, as far as I know (and I've asked religious right leaders making this claim for examples and never heard any), of a transgendered person or a cross dresser (which is not the same thing) committing any crime in any bathroom anywhere in the country. In fact, the only examples they can come up with are of heterosexual men doing it. Do they really think that men who want to spy on or molest women in bathrooms are going to go have sex change operations to make it easier?"

Brayton went on to question the use of the argument centered around "biology-based bathrooms," writing that the argument "is being made by people who are, of course, profoundly ignorant of biology--and in particular, of the biology of transgender, transsexual and intersexual people." Brayton noted that one out of one thousand men in America "is born with XXY chromosomes. Are they male or female? Which bathroom should they use? The anti-gay bigots want the world to be a simple black and white place where everyone is obviously male or female, but the real world just doesn't line up. Yes, most people fit comfortably into those categories, but a significant minority do not. And they didn't choose to be that way." Brayton questioned whether opponents of transgender students using the facilities with which they are comfortable "really believe that a high school kid is going to pretend to be transgendered in order to be allowed to use the girl's bathroom so they can sneak a peek? Seriously? Do they not recognize the abuse taken by any kid who is even perceived as being less than perfectly male or perfectly female?"

In the world of adults, the question of who is allowed to use the facilities is sometimes not even an issue. One reader of Brayton's op-ed commented, "My wife and I had the opportunity to go out the other night. We spent some time at a rather high-end bar in NYC. There was only one bathroom. It was all stalls with floor to ceiling separators. Im sure this would freak out the wingnuts as well, but the 'jaded NYers,' as well as the Bridge and Tunnel crowd didnt seem to care."