Matt Walsh:
The situation had grown absurd enough when the Attorney General came out this week and compared sex segregated restrooms to Jim Crow laws. Under the tyranny of Jim Crow, blacks were hung from trees. Under the tyranny of sex segregated restrooms, men have to go peepee in rooms with other men. Totally the same thing, obviously.
I thought that was a sufficient amount of craziness for one week, but President Obama apparently disagreed. Today, the president sent a magisterial declaration to all public schools in the country, demanding that they allow “transgender” students to use the bathroom that matches their “gender identity.”
From TheBlaze:
“A school may provide separate facilities on the basis of sex, but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity,” said a letter, obtained by TheBlaze, being sent to schools.
“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,” it added.
The letter arbitrarily decrees specific guidelines for how a school may accommodate normal kids who do not feel comfortable changing in locker rooms with “transgendered” members of the opposite sex. Magnanimously, Obama will allow these children to hide behind curtains or in bathroom stalls, but not in a separate facility. Of course, once a “transgendered” student complains that it makes him feel victimized when girls ruthlessly ostracize him by using curtains and bathroom stalls, I’m sure Obama will promptly decide that even those small considerations must be recalled. The feelings of the gender confused must always be the top priority.
Obama goes on to explain how, under Title IX laws outlawing sex discrimination, schools that do not allow gender confused boys to use the bathroom with girls could have federal funds withdrawn. Alternatively, they could simply be sued out of existence:
“As a condition of receiving Federal funds, a school agrees that it will not exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat differently on the basis of sex any person in its educational programs or activities unless expressly authorized to do so under Title IX or its implementing regulations,” the letter stated. “The Departments treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations.”
“The Departments interpret Title IX to require that when a student or the student’s parent or guardian, as appropriate, notifies the school administration that the student will assert a gender identity that differs from previous representations or records, the school will begin treating the student consistent with the student’s gender identity,” it added. “Under Title IX, there is no medical diagnosis or treatment requirement that students must meet as a prerequisite to being treated consistent with their gender identity.”
It should go without saying that the president is acting far beyond his constitutional authority here. I have perused Article Two of the Constitution and I find nothing granting the federal government the power to set bathroom guidelines for all 98,000 public schools in the nation. Obama has never let such trifles slow him down in the past, I realize, but this may actually represent his most strikingly dictatorial and illegitimate action to date.
The man, drunk and deranged with power, now thinks he can decide with narrow specificity where and how young girls across the country undress. They may have privacy behind the door of a bathroom stall, he permits, but not behind the door of a bathroom. They may use a curtain to shield themselves from the prying eyes of hormonal teenage boys, but they may not use the locker room itself for that purpose. They may segregate themselves from regular boys, but not from boys with mental delusions or cross dressing fetishes.
To call this simply “unconstitutional” would be a massive understatement. This is something far beyond that. This is utter and complete madness. And it should also be viewed as nothing short of sexual abuse in a sane world.
Further, what Obama is doing should be seen as the facilitating of sexual abuse of children. He is organizing and mandating it. He is requiring it. Same goes for any progressive who advocates these sorts of policies. To tell a child she must change or use the toilet in the same room as a mentally ill boy is abuse. If you left your daughter with a babysitter or a daycare worker and found out that she’d been deprived of privacy when she needed to go to the bathroom or change her clothes, you’d call the police and have the pervert in charge arrested. The situation in our public schools is not substantively different.
As I’ve explained before, the worry is not merely that non-”transgendered” boys will take advantage of the new “inclusivity” — although that is certainly a concern of its own. Boys in middle school and high school are going through a rather intense period known as “puberty”, and the temptation here may be too much for many of these pubescent kids to resist. After all, Obama’s royal pronouncement makes it clear that the only thing needed to confirm a boy’s “transgendered” legitimacy are his own word. Schools will not be legally permitted to call his bluff.
In fact, as Bruce Jenner has shown, a boy can be a boy one day, then a girl the next, then go back to being a boy again. None of this can be questioned. All of it must be treated as perfectly normal, good, and healthy.
But beyond normal boys pretending to be “transgendered,” the even greater threat are the so-called “transgendered” boys themselves. “Transgenders” are by definition mentally unstable and sexually deviant. Granting them, of all people, the privilege to use whichever bathroom strikes their fancy at the moment is incredibly dangerous. Explicitly telling these troubled kids that their desires and fetishes take precedence over the safety and dignity of their female classmates is reckless in the extreme.