Ohio District Refuses to Comply with Transgender Bathroom Order
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The Highland Local School District, including Knox, Delaware, and Morrow counties in Ohio, is suing the federal government because of the Obama administration’s policy that transgender students be allowed to use the bathroom or locker room that correlates to their gender identity.
Michael Haverluck of One News Now writes that the district wants to protect unclothed girls and boys from transgender students who are permitted to be in the bathrooms with them. The suit explains that a student’s right to privacy is being violated. Privacy, argues the suit, prohibits students from being forced to be nude when the opposite sex is present.
“All individuals, including students, have a constitutional right to bodily privacy protected by the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution that forbids the government from placing them in situations where they will expose their unclothed or partially clothed bodies to people of the opposite sex,” reads the lawsuit, according to WND-TV.
The district is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The district says that boys will not be allowed to use girls’ bathrooms. Instead, the “gender-confused boys” will have a private bathroom. The ADF stated that the federal government is using intimidation in the form of threatening to withhold federal funding.
ADF Senior Counsel Jim Campbell said the district has every right to refuse to follow a demand that involves opening its single-sex overnight accommodations, locker rooms, showers, and restrooms to students of the opposite sex.
One student, whom WND-TV’s Bob Unruh calls “troubled,” filed a complaint with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against the district because the student was denied access to “intimate facilities designated for the opposite sex.”
Soon, the OCR ordered the district “to violate the constitutionally protected privacy of all students in the three county’s public school system who identify with their appropriate biological sex.”
In an article for the Daily Caller, Casey Harper names the 14-year-old male student as Leigh Moore, who identifies as female.
The lawsuit says the DOE and the DOJ are illegally redefining the words of the Title IX policy, which can only be done by Congress. It adds that the two departments are forcing their will on public schools nationwide, writes Bob Eschliman for Charisma News.
The school attended by the transgender male serves low-income families, so if the school does not comply with the administration’s directive it could lose roughly $ 1 million in federal grants used to improve the quality of classroom teaching, allow for free lunches, and enhance special-education needs, says the ADF.
When he was in first grade, the school allowed Moore to use faculty restrooms and gave other students in his class the option to use the same facilities. And since 2012, school staff began addressing Moore as female, per a request from Moore’s legal guardian. By second grade, however, Moore was not allowed to use the girls’ restroom.
Emily LeVan, Moore’s mother, brought the complaint against the school board, reports Christianity Daily. LeVan said she was frustrated that the school was risking the loss of federal funding so it could have the right to discriminate.
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