Cooper: Leave bathroom decisions to states

Attorney General Loretta Lynch handed down the Obama administration's new guidance on transgender students and school bathrooms (and other accommodations).
Attorney General Loretta Lynch handed down the Obama administration's new guidance on transgender students and school bathrooms (and other accommodations).

The Obama administration has stepped once again into a place it doesn't belong - public school bathrooms.

Implying threats over what might happen if schools don't comply, the White House issued a letter on Friday demanding that schools allow students to use the bathroom that fits their current gender identity.

The letter doesn't carry the weight of law, but the implication of the loss of federal funds for school districts was clear.

However, this matter, like immigration, voting, gun and gay marriage laws, is better handled at the state levels.

As elected leaders and local officials told the Times Free Press Friday, the needs of a legitimate transgender student should be worked out in practical ways on a case-by-case basis.

The administration's directive does not require parents to present any medical diagnosis of even gender dysphoria - the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity is opposite that with which he or she was born - but simply allows the parent or guardian to notify the school district if the student's identity "differs from previous representation or records."

For a tiny minority of adults, 0.3 percent or less, this is a legitimate problem. For students in kindergarten through high school, simple gender confusion can arise from a boy playing dolls with his sister or a girl being competitive with boys on a little league baseball team.

However, individual children expressing a frustrated "I wish I were a (fill in the blank)" is not the same as actual gender dysphoria.

Unfortunately, in today's if-it-feels-good-do-it society, some parents don't help their children understand the gender with which they are born and either push them to become what they are not or allow them to select their gender.

Indeed, the American College of Pediatricians has said the idea of parents allowing their children to pick their gender is akin to child abuse.

According to the body's report, the endorsement of gender discordance by public education and legal policies will only confuse more children who otherwise have no biological reason to believe they should not identify with the gender with which they are born.

In addition, the report says it also will lead more children to use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which carry risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, bloods clots, strokes and cancer, and eventually consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts.

After puberty and without any counseling, based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V), 98 percent of gender-confused boys and 88 percent of gender-confused girls accept their biological sex.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration believes it knows best, grafting the words "gender identity" to the word "sex" used in the Title IX legislation which compels schools to have separate facilities for the two sexes.

"When Congress banned sex discrimination in 1964 and 1972, it clearly did not mean 'gender identity,'" said Heritage Foundation expert Roger Severino, a former attorney in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. "The president [is] disrespecting the very notion of the rule of law to direct otherwise."

"State lawmakers are acting to defend the commonsense privacy and safety interests of girls and boys in a way that would also accommodate people who identify as transgender, but the left has rejected this reasonable approach," he said.

But the measure goes further than you may have heard.

It sanctions the sharing by students identifying as the opposite of their birth gender of shower and locker-room facilities, a prospect that has mortified more people than the bathroom issue alone. It also permits transgender students to play on teams of the sex in which they identify and to participate in single-sex classes and extracurricular activities of their identified sex. In addition, it orders school employees to use the pronoun of the student's preferred gender when addressing the student.

The measure further encourages the inclusion of transgender students in areas not covered by Title IX, including single-sex schools, social fraternities and sororities, and housing and overnight accommodation. "Nothing in Title IX," it says, "prohibits a school from" allowing the various things mentioned.

Although the Obama administration has less than eight months left in which it can issue executive orders and directives that can be undone on the first day of a new administration, issues involving the rights of 0.3 percent of people are sure to become the next battleground running through the courts.

Yet, issues like this are best left to the states, as the 10th Amendment suggests: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." But when social issues intervene, courts today seem to be marching in lockstep with the if-it-feels-good-do-it crowd.

Upcoming Events