School district’s troubles stem from ignoring off-ramps from conflict
Just as a matter of prudence and policy, you have to wonder: Why, in the New Richmond school bathroom debacle, was it the girls who had to move?
When girls at New Richmond High School complained that their privacy was being invaded because authorities let a male student use their restroom, those authorities in essence told girls they were the problem. Girls were essentially given the message that that if they were uncomfortable, they were making trouble and would have to change.
The New Richmond School District was making trouble for itself, calling down onto its head a federal lawsuit by girls and their parents, as well as an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
All this because the district told girls that, by policy, the expectation that a girls’ restroom would be reserved for girls was unreasonable.
“At the school board meeting, when we said that we were uncomfortable, then the next day they started putting up maps of the school, and they’re like, ‘If you are uncomfortable, then you can go use the single-stall restroom,’” said Ella Frei, a junior and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
There are four such restrooms, including at least one normally set aside for teachers, mostly not near classrooms. “Nobody has the time to walk all the way down unless you’re missing class time,” said Frei.
Inconvenience is one thing. Attitude from the school board is another.
“Pushing all the girls’ emotions aside: We were all sitting in the front row, and when they said that, everyone was like, ‘If?’ Like, ‘We are uncomfortable, and we just said that to you.’ I don’t know what they’re not understanding.”
The complication is that the male student allowed to use the girls’ restroom is, as the lawsuit clarifies, “a male student who identifies as female.” How he identifies was nobody else’s business in the hallway or algebra class. It became one when adults turned what always had been a single-sex restroom into a mixed one.
The school board, said Frei, “didn’t see anything wrong with it, but all the girls that were using the restroom that were actually female saw a lot of things wrong with it.”
To be clear, the issue isn’t the male student, who’s reportedly uncomfortable using the boys’ restroom. It’s the adults overseeing the show.
Did, for instance, those adults ask the male student to use one of the single-stall restrooms? Parents, said Frei, “were just confused on why all their daughters should have to go and use one bathroom instead of just this one student going and using it.”
The district’s counsel said in February that a legal precedent requires letting the boy use the girls’ room, but that’s disputed by the students’ and parents’ counsel.
As the plaintiffs’ complaint points out, “sex separated bathrooms have been widely recognized throughout American history and jurisprudence.”
Did the school district’s counsel not know this? Was the board too frightened to stand up legally for its female students?
Was the district trying to be nice? Nothing wrong with that. Schools should try accommodating students’ unique needs. But here it imposed real costs on female students, which is not very nice at all. As one of the girls put it in the complaint, she “has effectively been told to ignore her discomfort, fears and instincts in order to accommodate others and that her boundaries do not matter.”
“No one is forcing your daughter out of these facilities,” the district’s superintendent wrote to one of the girls’ parents, adding, “If (the girl) is not comfortable using the girls’ bathroom, we do have single, private bathrooms available.”
Again with “if.” Again suggesting that the school expects girls to be copacetic with a teenage boy at the bathroom mirror, adjusting bra padding. The school may say its policy doesn’t force the girls to move, but that means that it expects them to accept a new set of social mores — one most Americans do not agree with.
Last year, the vaunted Pew Research said Americans favor girls’ restrooms being reserved for girls by a 2-to-1 margin. YouGov put it at 50% to 31% the year before. The school’s policy doesn’t reflect some new social consensus.
It presents, instead, a slippery-slope risk. Frei, on the volleyball team, said, “If we played along with it, it will go so much farther than what it’s already become,” meaning boys on girls teams.
She’s not wrong. In March, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill to reserve girls’ school sports teams for biological girls. His veto message said the bill “threatens the safety and dignity” of biological boys who want a spot in a girls’ volleyball game. He did not address the safety and dignity of girls who presumably could quit the team if they didn’t want to face the risk of injury or dressing room indignities.
A New York Times poll this year found that 79 percent of Americans are with the girls on this one.
So why would New Richmond School District make the girls move, in facilities or in attitude if the decision, as the girls’ lawyers argue, is clearly not based on a correct reading of the law, nor on a decent respect for the needs and concerns of the girls?
“This was our space to begin with,” said Frei, and why the district would adopt as its policy a kind of cultural aggression against that space has yet to be explained, if satisfactory explanation can be offered. All it’s led to is trouble for the district and its students.
Patrick McIlheran is executive editor at the Badger Institute.
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