Children across America are being forced to surrender their privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms because their school districts refuse to acknowledge biological reality. These incidents are not hypothetical and they are happening everywhere, including in America’s heartland.
Several years ago, a first grade female student at Shawnee Mission School District in Kansas, on multiple occasions encountered a biological male student in the girls’ restroom. For any female, let alone a young child, having to use the restroom with a male present is mentally and emotionally traumatizing, but the school district didn’t care. Despite her parents’ best efforts to protect their daughter’s privacy, the school district refused to change its policies allowing transgender individuals to use bathrooms of the opposite sex. Doubling down on their adoption of radical gender ideology, the school district is now forcing students to affirm their peers’ “preferred” (biologically incorrect) pronouns.
Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) and Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) are stepping in to stop these unconstitutional policies and practices. Supplementing an earlier complaint submitted by DFI, the organizations filed a complaint on behalf of the student and her parents with the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR), urging it to investigate the school district.
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They explain in the complaint that the policies “contravene Title IX and infringe the First Amendment rights and privacy interests of District students, including Parents and Daughter. These unlawful and unconstitutional policies actively harm district students like Parents, Daughter, and others. They cause trauma and confusion for children who are either forced to share private spaces with the opposite sex or be exiled from their own bathrooms. They turn Title IX on its head.”
The policies even violate recent federal court orders, including a Title IX ruling by a federal district court in Kansas halting the then-Biden Administration’s attempt to change the definition of biological sex under Title IX to include “gender identity.” In that lawsuit, SLF represents parent and student organizations challenging the Administration’s attempted regulations as unconstitutional because they would force students to change their beliefs, affirm views on gender identity and transgenderism, and self-censor in violation of the First Amendment. Yet despite that court order, Shawnee Mission School District continues to implement those very practices.
SLF and DFI are urging OCR to investigate the school district for its failure to comply with federal law, and the organizations will continue to monitor the district’s policies.