by Elizabeth Troutman
A 16-year-old Minnesota girl forced to share private spaces with males under a public school transgender policy says that girls deserve privacy in their restrooms and locker rooms.
“It’s really uncomfortable, because I was in gym class, and I was just about to change, but then I heard this voice, and I was, like, ‘That does not sound right.’ So, I look, and it’s a male,” said the rising junior at Stewartville High School, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely on the controversial issue.
In 2017, the Minnesota Department of Education issued a toolkit telling school districts to provide transgender students facilities, including bathrooms, locker rooms, and hotel rooms on overnight trips, that are “consistent with their gender identity.”
Many schools in the state have since issued their own policies, including the Minneapolis and Rochester districts, but others, such as the Stewartville Public School system in southern Minnesota, use the state Education Department’s guidelines to justify allowing boys who identify as transgender in girls’ restrooms.
The female high school junior talked to her school principal about feeling uncomfortable about changing in the locker room in the presence of a biological male. She said he told her that students can “be whoever they want to be.”
“They’re more making sure [transgender-identifying students] are comfortable, and not seeing what they are doing to us, and how we feel,” the teenage girl said.
The state transgender toolkit says school leaders must ensure access for all students to locker rooms, classes, sports, and activities, and hotel accommodations “in a manner that is safe, consistent with their gender identity, and does not stigmatize them.”
“Privacy objections raised by a student in interacting with a transgender or gender-nonconforming student may be addressed by segregating the student raising the objection, provided that the action of the school officials does not result in stigmatizing the transgender and gender-nonconforming student,” the Minnesota Department of Education guide reads.
The teenage girl said she is scared about boys pretending to be girls, then touching them or taking cellphone photos of girls in restrooms or locker rooms. She said she has talked to her friends who likewise feel unsafe about having to share a restroom or locker room with biological males.
“Anything can happen,” she said. “You’re still technically not a female, even if you did transition. It’s still not right.”
Jeannine Buntrock, a mother of three and local Moms for Liberty chapter president, has two daughters currently in the Stewartville Public School system. She told The Daily Signal she is especially concerned about her youngest daughter, 11, who will grow up hearing about radical gender ideology at school.
“I worry that she will be relentlessly conditioned to accept biological males in female spaces, and to see gender as a choice,” she said. “My two teens know it’s nonsense. This is why activists are trying to push material into younger and younger grades—[it’s as] if they seek to disrupt a child’s sense of gender and sexuality, the younger the better.”
Women have historically fought to have their own spaces, Buntrock said. She described washing her hands next to a 12-year-old boy in a gender-neutral restroom and feeling uncomfortable, even though she is an adult.
“Today’s girls must not be conditioned to believe that they must force themselves to be comfortable with sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with biological males,” she said.
Buntrock’s other objection is that the schools are teaching gender theory as fact, she said.
“If they taught it at an appropriate age, as one theory among several to consider, I’d tolerate that,” she said, “but instead they are teaching wholesale acceptance of gender theory as a sign of being a ‘good person’—of being inclusive. That’s manipulation.”
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Elizabeth Troutman is a reporting fellow for The Daily Signal.
Photo “Women’s Locker Room” by Allan Mas.
