Opinion | Is It Time to Desegregate the Sexes? (original) (raw)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/opinion/sunday/is-it-time-to-desegregate-the-sexes.html

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Opinion

Oct. 15, 2016

Credit...Matt Chase

You could be forgiven for thinking that the most fiercely contested territory in America right now is the bathroom. On Monday, the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether it will hear G.G. v. Gloucester School Board, which turns on the question of whether Gavin Grimm, a 16-year-old transgender boy, may use the men’s room.

But there’s another theater for the clash of values — gender inclusiveness versus bodily privacy — raised by transgender rights, and it may be even more charged. I mean the locker room. Most restrooms have enclosed stalls. Locker rooms are open, at least in older schools built on the assumption that students of the same sex would un-self-consciously disrobe. In these spaces, bodies stand revealed to other bodies.

Imagine the following scenario. Two teenagers have to change for gym. Both wear the skinny jeans and Converse sneakers that make up the quasi-uniform of the American middle-schooler. But one was born with a girl’s body, the other with a boy’s. The second has asked the school to consider her a girl, and the school has agreed to do so. But the girl-born-a-girl (the cisgender girl, to use the preferred term) does not want to strip in front of the transgender girl or have that person strip in front of her. Meanwhile, the transgender girl does not want to be banished from the common area like some sort of freak. The standoff will end only when one retreats to a stall to change in private. Which one will it be?

According to the federal agencies charged with enforcing Title IX, the statute banning sex discrimination at publicly funded schools, the cisgender girl must cede the floor. But 23 states, a number of Christian groups and at least one radical feminist organization disagree. They have filed lawsuits to challenge that view.

The problem schools face is that they can’t prevent sex discrimination unless they can say with certainty what sex is. And in an age of gender fluidity, the word is hard to define. This year the agencies told schools to interpret “sex” as a psychological condition, an “internal sense of gender,” rather than an anatomical one. The new interpretation has some science to back it up. But the way the change was made — by fiat, without public debate — has produced a surprisingly broad backlash, from secular feminists as well as evangelical conservatives.

It’s hard even to write the words “locker room” after last Sunday’s presidential debate, when Donald J. Trump repeated the phrase “locker room talk” three times to justify his accounts of possibly felonious groping. In the popular imagination, the locker room is where mean kids bully vulnerable ones, including, of course, gender-nonconforming ones. It would seem to be the perfect place to render justice to transgender students.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT