(LifeSiteNews) – The Florida Board of Education (BOE) unanimously approved new rules Wednesday making it a fireable offense for public college employees to defy state law requiring restrooms and changing facilities to be reserved to actual members of their designated sex.
Fox News reported that under the new rules, employees will face termination upon their second violation of HB 1521, signed into law in May by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The law applies not just to public universities but to student housing as well.
“Bathroom spaces are very intimate and private,” BOE member Grazie Christie said. “There is historically- and cross-culturally accurate reasons why males and females use different spaces in those intimate moments, not just for girls and women, but also for boys and men. This is not something that as a culture we should ditch because of very, very new ideologies that are challenging the science of male and female, which doesn’t change because biology doesn’t change.”
“These threats of bathroom investigations, forced firing of personnel, and restrictions on dormitories in the Florida College System will only worsen the current culture of fear and intimidation against the transgender community,” complained former Democrat state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, now a senior policy adviser for LGBT advocacy group Equality Florida.
Critics argue that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status, as demonstrated in Loudoun County, Virginia.
The problem was on full display in Virginia in 2021 when a grand jury returned charges against fired ex-Loudoun County Public Schools superintendent Scott Ziegler for allegedly covering up the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls bathroom due to its damaging implications for the LGBT movement.
Florida, which recently fined five state Medicaid providers for illegally spending taxpayer dollars on underage gender “transition” procedures, has taken the lead in opposing transgender ideology under DeSantis, whose proactive conservative record fueled his 20-point gubernatorial reelection last fall and his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next year, through which he vows to take such efforts nationwide.