PALATINE, ILLINOIS, October 14, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The Obama administration is suing yet another school district for refusing to allow a biological teenage male to use the girls' locker room, restroom, and shower facilities.
Yesterday, the federal government found a the school in violation of a new interpretation of Title IX, a 1972 law designed to prevent sex discrimination.
Nothing in the law – or any other federal civil rights legislation – specifies that it applies to transgender individuals.
That decision came after what a district spokesperson described as months of negotiation.
A male student who identifies as female sued Township High School District 211 in 2014 for access to the female locker room.
The district said the student could use a separate, private room instead.
“At some point, we have to balance the privacy rights of 12,000 students with other particular, individual needs of another group of students,” said District 211 Superintendent Daniel Cates. “We believe this infringes on the privacy of all the students that we serve.”
This wasn't good enough for the ACLU, however, which represented the male student in a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education (DoE)'s Office for Civil Rights.
John Knight, the LGBT and HIV Project Director of the ACLU of Illinois, called the decision “blatant discrimination.”
“We're talking about somebody who is being denied fair and equal treatment as compared to the other students, only because she [sic] is transgender,” he said.
The student had been told he could use a private restroom and changing area, or use the same locker room as his natural gender.
Many schools have acceded to the federal government's demands to provide transgender students access to the private areas of the opposite sex, in part because the Obama administration has threatened to withhold federal education dollars.
However, an Alliance Defending Freedom attorney described the Title IX change as “politically motivated,” telling LifeSiteNews that the change has no binding effect on schools who choose to ignore it.