Transgender Students’ Access to Bathrooms

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/opinion/transgender-students-access-to-bathrooms.html

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To the Editor:

Re “U.S. Issues Notice on Students Who Are Transgender” (front page, May 13): The Obama administration’s bold directive to public schools outlining their obligations under federal law to protect transgender students puts forth a laudable and reasonable approach to recognizing the dignity and well-being of all students with practical and concrete guidance for educators and schools.

Arguments that ensuring appropriate bathroom access to transgender students infringes on the rights of other students are no different than the arguments made when bathrooms and other venues marked “for colored only” were integrated in the 1960s. Those arguments are just as false today as they were then.

As Vanita Gupta, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, made clear last week: Transgender women are women and transgender men are men. This directive is a common-sense approach, not to mention entirely consistent with well-settled discrimination case law.

SETH M. MARNIN

Vice President, Civil Rights

Anti-Defamation League

New York

To the Editor:

Here is the essence of the administration’s directive to schools to permit use of restroom and locker room facilities on the basis of “gender identification” rather than biological sex: “A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so” (emphasis added). In that regard, the directive notes that “the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students.”

In other words, efforts to reasonably accommodate the needs of an infinitesimally small minority, in a manner likely to cause no controversy and attract little attention, will not do. As to the age-old social norms and privacy expectations of everybody else … well, tough.

Can there be a better example of so-called progressive ideology run riot?

HOWARD F. JAECKEL

New York

To the Editor:

Remember Rachel Dolezal, the former head of a local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. — a white woman who identified as black and was out of a job when it was determined she was white? What is all this nonsense about “identifying” being hailed as a criterion for fair treatment?

If the Obama administration is determining that protecting students who “identify” as a particular gender — regardless of their biological gender — is worth withholding federal money, why was Ms. Dolezal condemned for her identifying-as-black activities? There is a double standard at work here.

Society either protects identifying or it does not.

ELINOR HITE

Carrollton, Tex.

To the Editor:

If President Obama’s order for transgender bathroom access in all public schools can prevent one tortured teenager from committing suicide, his mission will have been accomplished. The world can indeed be mean and cruel. It’s no wonder that teenage suicide among transgender youths is high and so many drop out of school.

JoANN LEE FRANK

Clearwater, Fla.

To the Editor:

Re “Lawmaker Has a Mother’s Role in a Rights Fight” (front page, May 16):

While I sympathize with Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s support of her transgender son, I can’t help but wonder at the hypocrisy of most Republicans’ opposition to gay and transgender rights until they face the issue in their own homes.

Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, of course, should be applauded for her motherly love and instinct to support her son after reading a note he left saying he was transgender, publicly distancing herself from her party’s position on transgender rights. But her fellow Republicans should take pause and reflect on what their positions might be if they found such a note from one of their children.

DAN GREENBURG

Merrick, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Those who support laws requiring people to use the public bathroom designated for the sex listed on their birth certificate should consider this: In North Carolina, under such a law, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the bearded, very masculine young man whose photograph appears in the article, is required to use the women’s room. No discretion, no individualization: He goes to the ladies’. So much for the argument of “protecting” one’s daughters from seeing “someone who looks like a man” there.

Gender is neither binary nor always externally obvious. It is complex. Any attempt to dichotomize gender based on one criterion (in this case, a birth certificate) cannot work in all cases.

JON D. MORROW

New York