WND
October 20, 2013
Girls at a Colorado high school are being forced to allow an older boy to use their bathrooms as the result of a policy of transgender accommodation, and the girls say they are being threatened with punishment if their complaints don’t stop.
The debate is happening at Florence High School in Florence, Colo., located near Colorado Springs. Parents of several girls are seeking a legal remedy after their daughters were required to share bathrooms with a male who maintains his true gender identity is that of a woman.
“First of all, it’s our position that a teenage boy’s presence into the bathroom for teenage girls is inherently harassing,” said Matthew McReynolds, staff attorney at the Pacific Justice Institute, who is representing the families of the girls involved. “It’s inherently violative of their privacy rights. It’s also intimidating when you have a boy like this, who is not a freshman, going in there with younger freshman girls. They feel violated. They feel intimidated, and that’s been expressed to us.”
The girls further allege the boy has made sexually harassing comments in that setting.
“Details continue to emerge on this in terms of what what kind of comments may have been made. We’ve heard some reports that he’s commented on what girls are wearing or their figure while in the bathroom. If you can imagine that scenario from the reference and framework of a teenage girl, I think that’s pretty harassing,” said McReynolds, who reiterated that a boy simply being in the girls’ restroom is ample harassment in itself.
Also galling to the female students and their parents is the backlash the girls have suffered from their own school administrators, who have vowed to punish the students if their protests persist.
“Some of the students have been warned that they need to stop talking about this. They need to stop talking about their constitutional privacy rights, more or less, or they may face repercussions in areas such as participation on school athletic teams,” McReynolds told WND.