Two male transgender teens who legally pressured a Chicago school district to let them use the girls' bathrooms and locker rooms won a school board vote last week allowing full access.

Two male transgender teens who legally pressured a suburban Chicago school district to let them use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms won a 5-2 school board vote last week allowing “full access,” reports the local CBS affiliate.

Nova “Maday’s attorneys said the fact she [sic] is anatomically male has nothing to do with her [sic] gender identity, and should have no relevance on whether she’s [sic]allowed access to the girls’ locker room,” CBS 2 reported.

“It’s not everything we want,” Maday said of the school board vote, citing other policies he wants, including transgender student IDs. Yet “It’s a great first step… and school districts all across the state and nation are watching.”

According to CBS 2, an unnamed female student told school board members during public comments before the vote, “I do not want to see a transgender student naked in the locker room. I do not want a transgender student to see me naked in the locker room.”

After the vote, another visibly upset student named Julia Burca told The Daily Herald, “I feel uncomfortable that my privacy is being invaded. Because I am a swimmer I do change multiple times naked in front of other students in the locker room. I understand that the board has an obligation to all students, but I was hoping they would go about this in a different way that would accommodate students such as myself.”

The Ratchet Only Goes One Way

Even if her school board had the will to protect young women like Burca, these policies are subject to unelected judges and federal bureaucrats. Therefore even if parents did change their school board, which is difficult enough and so far has required fighting outside money and the entire media-political establishment, they are likely not to be able to get it to rescind this policy.

That’s likely one reason no public school district has yet undone any transgender policy, as far as I’m aware of. I mention this in every article I write about such incidents and have yet to have any readers inform me of any reversal.

District 211 is just an illustration of how this ratchet works everywhere. In 2015, under pressure from the Obama administration via a complaint from another transgender student, Palatine-Schaumberg District 211 started allowing transgender access to single-person changing stalls both inside and outside formerly single-sex private areas.

Maday sued to use the locker room right next to the undressing girls. Enraged parents also sued the district with the help of religious liberty nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom. Earlier this spring, however, a federal district court judge threw out half of the parents’ case, ruling students have no constitutional right to privacy and that parents’s rights do not include having schools teach what parents believe.

The suing parents “have cited no case that suggests the right to direct education includes a right not to have their teachings undermined by public school (beyond, of course, the right to choose private school instead),” wrote Judge Jorge Alonso. The parents dropped their case soon after this adverse ruling.

Using a Few Pieces of Silver to Amass Enormous Power

Where did this whole situation start? Well, in 2015 the Obama administration pressured District 211 — and every other district into the nation — into trans bathrooms to comply with “non-discrimination law and g[a]ve the district 30 days to comply or else jeopardize its Title IX funding,” CBS 2 says.

Palatine-Schaumberg District 211, comprised of 11,762 high school students, fits the “wokester” profile: predominantly white, wealthy, and well-credentialed, according to federal statistics. Illinois is known for its massive property taxes, and District 211 makes an annual outlay per student of a whopping $25,371. Of that, $18,875 comes from local taxes. Just $563 per student, or 2 percent of the district’s budget, comes from federal funding.

Thus the feds told District 211, an obviously wealthy district that can easily afford to spend a little less or raise a little more, that 2 percent of its budget was required in exchange for exposing young girls’ naked bodies to mentally ill young men every day. The district chose the money over the girls’ innocence.

It’s not just this school district, either. They all do it. Every time in the past 50 years the federal government has told schools to sacrifice the best interests of their students for a tiny bit of money, the schools have chosen the money. The trans bathrooms issue makes this underlying dynamic more shocking and obvious, but it’s been depriving Americans of an education befitting a free people for generations.

We Can’t Go On Like This

This has created an existential crisis for our nation. Many of our citizens lack the basic knowledge to function as self-governing citizens, precisely because our schools don’t teach it. This is a threat to our very existence as a people capable of self-government. I’ll just cite one example here for brevity, but there are hundreds more.

In a October 2019 YouGov study commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the youngest generations were the most likely to say that communism was presented favorably in their K-12 schooling. One-quarter of the youngest generation, Gen Z, said this. It’s pretty easy to make an educated guess that communism “lite,” or socialism, is presented favorably in public schools in significantly higher numbers.

I shouldn’t have to make this conclusion obvious, but given the state of affairs I clearly do: communism is the antithesis of American government. The point at which we have even a significant minority of voters supporting it is the point at which America is over. Elections are often within a percentage point, and the winner takes all. All the socialists need is an electoral wedge, and given the Democratic primary polling numbers for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they’ve already got one.

If our public schools are increasing sympathy for socialism and communism — and they clearly are — then they are an enemy of representative government and our natural rights. Same thing for transgender bathrooms: if our public schools are actively accommodating and promoting a denial of basic reality, they have lost all moral and intellectual authority and deserve to be immediately replaced.

A public school system that gets this basic of a reality and morality check wrong — how can it be trusted with anything important? Will trans bathrooms clarify this reality for enough parents to motivate demands for our representatives to get off their rear ends and get us relief?

Parents, Taxpayers Need an Escape Hatch Pronto

I live in a red state, and when our Republican leaders have addressed this issue their stock answer to avoid responsibility for the public education systems they oversee has been “local control.” If you don’t like it, parents, get out and vote in a new school board.

This is not an issue on which there is a grey area. It is simply wrong to force naked girls to be in the same room as naked boys.

This is an inane, self-immolating response from men with no chests. It completely ignores the legal and social dynamics at play, and the reality that local control no longer exists. Besides, it’s very obviously a convenient excuse for cowardice.

When crazy people run into public schools brandishing a gun, do Republicans shrug their shoulders and tell voters, “You want more funds for school safety, vote in a new school board”? When unions use deceptive statistics to claim that teachers are underpaid, do Republicans say, “Teacher pay is a local issue. Take it up with the school district we’ve freed to make their own financial decisions”? In both cases they should, but they absolutely do not. They typically rush to “do something.”

Only when we get into protecting children from insane ideology do Republicans refuse to get involved. It’s like they think ideas don’t matter, yet they’re mystified come election time when basic ideas of property rights, the right to life, the importance of marriage, personal responsibility, and other fundamentals glance right over voters’ heads and they’re reduced to hocking taxpayers’ money for votes on a slightly smaller scale than the Santa Claus Democrats. That’s an equation they’re never going to win.

This is not an issue on which there is a grey area. It is simply wrong to force naked girls to be in the same room as naked boys. It is an assault on their natural rights and on their human dignity. It is an embarrassment that this needs to even be said. Have the transgender doctors spayed and neutered all the politicians in this country too?

Boycott, Divest, Sanction, Stat

Since it is a moral outrage to force children into these situations, it is also a moral outrage to force taxpayers to pay for children’s moral, emotional, and psychological deformation through these policies and the curriculum that undergirds them. Most Republicans accept this basic principle by opposing taxpayer funds for abortion. It’s high time we got a Hyde Amendment for education indoctrination as well, both in K-12 and higher ed.

Public schools have long taught secular religion under the pretense of religious neutrality. The transgender debate makes it absolutely clear that they cannot possibly accommodate both sets of religious, moral, and scientific values. It’s time for those who claim to represent people of faith and science to enact boycott divestment sanction policies for the kind of education that tolerates this outrage.

What does that mean? For politicians:

Full school choice for all parents. If they’re okay with penises next to their underage daughters, they can keep their public schools. If not, they won’t be forced to ransom their hostage children by paying taxes on top of private tuition. Plus: Hugely popular with minority voters. Tax restructuring. Forcing people to bundle tuition with their property taxes is an outdated way to pay for public schools that disadvantages the poor. It also handicaps school choice possibilities. Make school board elections on the same day as all other elections, to reduce special interest control of education. Divest institutions of all public funds used on Marxist gender studies and other ideological programs that fuel this garbage, very much including teacher schools, which are havens of communist and socialist indoctrination of the people who teach kids. End the U.S. Department of Education so it can’t force schools into transgender policies and God knows what else to come.

For parents and charitable givers: Get kids out of public schools. Move to a cheaper house if you have to. Cut cable. Get a new job. Ask your extended family and church to help with tuition. Give to your extended family and church for help with tuition.

Without serious education reforms, children in those classrooms are sitting ducks for experimentation. The process is rigged against parents. As the Illinois case shows, even if you go to court it will take four years to lose, all while your children must endure lies and indignities that will deeply affect them. They deserve better than this.

UPDATE: