NV transgender bill will get hearing, is potentially illegal

Nevada's potentially illegal bill segregating transgender students into separate school bathrooms will receive its first hearing before state lawmakers on Friday, and it's attracting national attention.

The country's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights advocacy group will testify against the bill.

The bill "would conflict with federal protections for transgender and gender non-conforming students and expose such students to additional bullying and harassment," warned Alison Gill, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign based in Washington, D.C.

The group's logo – an equal symbol – has gone viral in recent years, becoming synonymous with LGBT equal rights.

Transgender people are those who identify as the gender opposite to the body in which they were born, a condition recognized by the American Psychiatric Association.

Assembly Bill 375 would mandate that bathrooms and locker rooms "only be used by persons of that biological sex" in Nevada public schools. The bill – filed by Sen. Scott Hammond, R-Las Vegas, and Rep. Victoria Dooling, R-Las Vegas – goes on to explicitly ban transgender students from bathrooms aligned to their asserted gender, forcing them to use a unisex restroom or faculty restroom.

AB375 has sat idle for nearly a month, never heard by the Assembly Education Committee. But the Assembly Judiciary Committee will give it a hearing at 8 a.m. Friday.

The Judiciary Committee is chaired by conservative Assemblyman Ira Hansen, R-Sparks, who recently stepped down as speaker of the Assembly under pressure from his party. Hansen's resignation was the result of derogatory remarks made about blacks, women, Latinos and gays in his former newspaper columns.

The transgender-segregating bill has drawn opposition from other groups – Reno's Transgender Allies Group and the National Center for Transgender Equality – which also plan to submit testimony in opposition to the bill at Friday's hearing. And they're sticking to the same argument.

The bill's requirements fly in the face of Title IX as interpreted by numerous courts throughout the country and the U.S. Department of Education, setting the state up for potential federal lawsuits and loss of federal education funding if passed.

Title IX, a Nixon-era federal law, prohibits schools that receive federal funds from engaging in sex discrimination or harassment of students. Questions have long surrounded the law's extension to transgender students, until recently.

According to a memo sent from the U.S. Department of Education to school districts in April 2014, "The actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the parties does not change a school's obligations."

The federal agency said it will investigate complaints of transgender discrimination and segregation.

"School districts have already been found liable for discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression under both federal and state law (outside of Nevada)," Gill said.

The Washoe County School District has long allowed principals to segregate transgender students into separate bathrooms, but the Washoe School Board changed that in February, fearing that principals' decisions were putting the district in violation of Title IX.

The School Board adopted a new regulation mandating equal treatment and protections for transgender students.

Washoe's regulation requires that "students have the right to be addressed by the names and pronouns that correspond to their gender identity." Failure to do so would be considered a violation of the district's policy prohibiting bullying, harassment and discrimination.

Students must have access to the restroom of their identified gender. They can "not be forced to use the restroom corresponding to their…biological sex at birth, nor an alternative restroom," reads the regulation.

District officials acknowledged that transgender students were previously segregated by principals out of fear of the unknown.

Bill proponents will claim segregation is needed to prevent sexual assaults, said Brock Maylath, president and co-founder of Reno's Transgender Allies Group.

"No record of a transgender person harassing a non-transgender person in a restroom exists," said Maylath.

Judy Chiasson can attest to that in Los Angeles Unified School District, having overseen the integration of transgender students into the bathroom of their choosing for a decade.

Chiasson said the district of 700,000 students has not received one report of sexual misconduct by transgender students: "If anything, the transgender student is going to be the victim."

The three groups preparing to speak in opposition to the bill on Friday called the legislation a way to increase fear of transgender people, not understanding or acknowledgement.

"AB375 is an unnecessary solution in search of a problem," said Arli Christian, policy counsel for the National Center for Transgender Equality.