| THE CULTURE WARS

All eyes are on 15-year-old Gavin Grimm at a school board meeting in Gloucester, Va., the small town where he has lived his entire short life. Gavin is here because the main item of business before the board on the afternoon of Dec. 9, 2014, has to do with him. The board is voting on whether he should be allowed to use the boys bathroom at Gloucester High School. Designated a girl at birth, Gavin, now 16, is transgender. He came out to his family after a long struggle in 2014, and has been taking hormones as part of the transition process. He has legally changed his name, dresses as a boy, and lives as a boy in every way. When he started 10th grade in September 2014, the administration granted his request to use the boys room. But now, in response to complaints from members of the community, the school board was compelled to vote on a policy that would prohibit him from using the boys room and require him to use a gender-neutral bathroom or the girls room. As the floor opens for public debate on the question, Gavin, wearing a crisp checked dress shirt and a royal-blue tie, rises and approaches the microphone at a podium in the aisle. He faces the board without fidgeting, his posture erect and his hands folded, speaking with composure and precision. “I want to say that this has been a very, very long process,” he says. “I’ve been aware of who I was since I was a very young kid, and it’s taken me a very long time to be able to be myself and be OK with that. The person I am now, being able to have all my rights in full, is such a massive, dynamic difference from the person I was just last summer. The person I was last summer was an inauthentic, incorrect, upset, angry person, because I was not able to be myself. Gloucester High School has done something unimaginably wonderful for me, and I cannot thank my principal, my administration enough for that.

AP AP FULL-COURT PRESS Bowing to pressure from community members, Gloucester (Va.) High School officials reversed course and barred student Gavin Grimm (above) from the boys’ bathroom. The transgender teen and his family have filed suit in federal court; the case could one day establish a nationwide standard.

“If the evidence said that me using the boys room would be catastrophic, I would not be advocating for myself, regardless of my personal emotions on this issue,” Gavin continues. “I look only at the facts, as one should in an issue that requires separation of church and state, and feelings and state. I guess, in conclusion, I would like to thank you for exercising your right to speak here, and thank you for hearing my voice.” With that, he returns to his seat. In the video of the meeting, Gavin sits just outside the frame as a procession of speakers march to the mic to weigh in. The camera remains fixed on the podium, and aside from an occasional glimpse of his shirt or his hand, you never see him. But you know he’s there, absorbing it all, as one person after another disparages his right to use the boys restroom. He listens to one of his fellow students, an articulate young woman who says she aspires to be a journalist, tell the crowd, “Fact: despite what the world will tell you, discomfort with public indecency is not hateful or discriminatory. It’s biology, not politics.” He hears a male student say, “The Grimm family and the media say students don’t care one way or another about what happens in the high school or who uses the bathrooms. We do care. The main reason you don’t see more of us is that several of my friends have told me, we are afraid to come to these meetings, that they are afraid of being bullied in school and in the community, of being labeled hateful or intolerant or sexist just because they are uncomfortable having a biological girl in the men’s room.” Gavin sits patiently as an older man in a baggy sweatshirt says, “Here we have a thousand students versus one freak. Who should accommodate who?” Not everyone speaks out against Gavin’s position. Among his supporters is the African-American pastor of a local church. “The issue you’re talking about now is the civil rights issue of this generation,” he says in a deep, resonant preacher’s voice. “Who are we to judge and set one child against another? If we can’t change the way people feel about each other, we can change the way they act. And that would be the best lesson they could learn.” In the end, the board votes, 6-1, in favor of a new policy: If Gavin doesn’t want to use the girls room, he will be required to use a private unisex bathroom. Or he will just have to hold it.





Normally mundane school-board meetings around the nation are emerging as one of the latest arenas in the fight over civil rights for transgender people in the United States. That 2014 vote in the Gloucester High auditorium initiated a legal battle that is moving steadily upward through the courts and has the potential to set national precedent. Skirmishes over transgender rights are being waged at the state and municipal level as well, such as an anti-discrimination ordinance in Houston aimed at protecting LGBT people, which was crushed in a November referendum after an ad campaign stoked fears over “men in women’s bathrooms.” Much of the current debate, however, is playing out at the ultra-local level. In many cases, school districts are considering the issue without much education or information on a subject that is still new and widely misunderstood to most people in the country. For students like Gavin, the bathroom and locker room question is anything but trivial. Being asked to use the facilities of their birth gender — or even gender-neutral facilities that no other students use and that are often far from classrooms — is degrading and alienating, they say, making an already difficult transition even more so. “I am not the kind of person by nature to roll over and accept an injustice, no matter where it may be,” Gavin tells me nearly a year after the school board vote. “Knowing what kind of humiliation and ostracism that a school doing this to a child can do, I do not want anyone to go through this ever again.” “We got hate calls and threats,” says the mother of a 14-year-old transgender girl. “Grandfathers saying they would stand outside the bathroom and teach her to be a man. The principal told me…she could (not) protect my child. It got so bad we had to move.” In June 2015, Gavin and his family filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, challenging the policy that the Gloucester County School Board adopted that December afternoon. The new policy, Gavin’s suit argued, violated his rights under Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational settings, and the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. They asked for a temporary injunction at the beginning of the school year to allow him to use the boys restroom. After a federal judge ruled against Gavin in September 2015, the boy and his lawyers took the case to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s the first case on this issue to make it this far up the legal chain; the next stop is the Supreme Court. The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education both filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, indicating the Obama administration’s strong support for the interpretation of Title IX as applicable to transgender issues. Oral arguments are scheduled for late January, and a decision could come down within the next few months. Many objections to transgender bathroom use rest on ideological or religious conviction. But for schools, the question is more practical than philosophical. While transgender people make up only 1-2% of the population, growing numbers of transgender kids are coming out at a younger and younger age. Parents are increasingly supporting their children’s gender identity — and demanding their rights to live without fear of discrimination or bullying. “Transgender students have always been around,” says Harper Jean Tobin, director of policy for the National Center for Transgender Equality, who is transgender herself. “Like most people of my generation, I did not come out as transgender until a couple of years after high school. I didn’t have role models, or an idea that this was a way I could live in the world. It’s more and more possible now.” As part of a comprehensive transgender-friendly approach from the Obama administration, the Department of Education is supporting kids and their families. Under the federal government’s current interpretation of Title IX, as expressed in national guidelines released by the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in April 2014, those rights include using the bathroom and locker-room facilities of the gender that kids identify with. This is in line with the American Psychiatric Association’s position on gender dysphoria, the diagnosis now used for people whose birth gender does not match the gender they identify with. But some districts, like the one in Gloucester, are pushing back, defying the federal guidelines in the hope that they will prevail in court, and that ultimately, Title IX protections will be denied to transgender students. They are being given confidence and, in some cases, legal advice, by some of the most powerful and influential conservative legal organizations in the country. According to Joshua Block of the ACLU, who is working on the Grimm case, it’s increasingly rare for schools to refuse a child the right to dress according to their gender identity, or to call them by their name and pronoun of choice. But that understanding often stops at the bathroom or locker-room door.

ZUMA Press/Corbis John Hickey for Daily News FLUSH WITH CONTROVERSY The battle over transgender students’ bathroom rights has led to boisterous school-board meetings across the country. In Palatine, Ill. (left), opposing parties arrived at a settlement that left both sides disappointed. In Lancaster, N.Y. (right), the board opted to table the debate for the time being.

Opponents of the federal guidelines often cast their opposition in terms of simple common sense. In Wisconsin, state Rep. Jesse Kremer is introducing a so-called “bathroom bill” in the next legislative session. In the name of protecting the privacy of all students, the bill would essentially prohibit the implementation of federal guidelines regarding bathroom and locker use, requiring transgender students to use gender-neutral restrooms. The Wisconsin legislation echoes laws that have failed to progress through the legislative process in Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas and several other states. “The average man on the street gets our bill. It seems reasonable,” says Julaine Appling, the president of Wisconsin Family Action, which supports Kremer’s legislation. “Restroom use is based on biological function, and that is a bright line. Whether those who are bent on androgynizing humanity or not admit it, there is an anatomical difference in the way men use the restroom and the way women use the restroom.” “Try to imagine that someone is trying to force you into the other bathroom,” Dr. Johanna Olson says. “Or even go into the other bathroom — the one with the other placard. Just try that once. And then imagine doing that day after day after day.” Such reasoning misses the point, counters Dr. Johanna Olson of the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of the most prominent physicians in the United States working with transgender children and their families. “We have a sort of community belief that genitals equal gender,” she says. “This makes it problematic for cisgender people” — those who identify with their birth gender — “to understand transgender experience.” Olson, who frequently speaks to national audiences on transgender issues, offers a simple thought experiment to clarify the question. “Try to imagine that someone is trying to force you into the other bathroom,” she says. “Or even go into the other bathroom — even if it’s not a public multi-use bathroom, go to the one with the other placard. Just try that once. And then imagine doing that day after day after day.” Despite objections like those expressed by Appling, schools and families of transgender kids frequently reach an agreement relatively easily, often under the guidance of state policy. Districts from Washington State to Florida allow transgender and gender-nonconforming students to use the bathrooms they want, and have been for years. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest with about 650,000 students, a policy allowing kids to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their expressed gender has been in place for a decade. “I have yet to be called into a situation to respond to an actual incident; I’ve only had to respond to fears, and the fears are unfounded,” said Judy Chiasson, of the LAUSD’s Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity, in an interview for an amicus brief on the plaintiffs’ side in the Grimm case. In other districts, though, the matter has been a source of conflict. Sometimes the tension is quiet save for the grinding of the rumor mill in high school hallways, supermarket aisles, and the comments section of community news websites. Sometimes, as in Gloucester, it plays out in the public square.

AP Courtesy Children's Hospital Los Angeles COME AS YOU ARE Julaine Appling (left), the president of Wisconsin Family Action, says, “There is an an anatomical difference in the way men use the restroom and the way women use the restroom.” However, Dr. Johanna Olson (right), of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, says such reasoning misses the point: “We have a community belief that genitals equal gender.”

Maybe you’re a parent. Maybe you aren’t. Either way, try to imagine having a transgender child — a child you love no less because of his or her identity. Now imagine sending that child out into a world where many people can't understand, or refuse to accept, that identity. You watch your kid go off to school knowing that transgender kids are often shunned and bullied by their peers, and even by adults. A stunning 40% of transgender people attempt suicide, and more than 50% of trans youth try to kill themselves before they turn 20. A world where transgender people of all ages are frequently victims of violence — and where transgender women, in particular, are being murdered at a shocking rate. In the first 10 months of 2015, 22 trans women were murdered in the U.S., nearly double the number in all of 2014. Most of them were women of color. All this despite Caitlyn Jenner’s glamorous turn on the cover of Vanity Fair, the Emmys showered on the show “Transparent,” and the emergence of Laverne Cox, of “Orange Is the New Black,” as one of the most popular celebrities in the United States. All this despite the Obama Administration’s concerted effort to promote trans-friendly policies, not just through the DOE, but across the board. Over the past several weeks, in conversation with parents from New Mexico and Canada to Rhode Island and Georgia who live this reality, I heard them echo the same concerns over and over: their feelings of powerlessness as strangers squabble over their children’s right to live an ordinary life. Their abiding desire to protect their kids from harm. “The cloud hanging over me over all the time is the suicide rate,” says Stacey, a California mother of an 8-year-old transgender girl who spoke on the condition that I not use her last name. She sees the fight for full rights, and for changing societal attitudes, as vital to keeping her child safe and healthy, and she has been working with her daughter’s school to have her treated with dignity and respect. “The only way the world is going to change is if kids like mine are part of it,” she says. “Maybe by the time my child is in high school the [attempted-suicide] rate won’t be 40% for transgender people. If you knew there was a…chance that your child would die, wouldn’t you do anything you could?” According to national studies, high rates of depression and suicide among transgender youth can be directly linked to the stigmatization they experience in society, which is what makes a story like that of Nikki, a mother to a transgender girl, so disturbing. Nikki and her family were living in a rural area in the deep South when her daughter, now 14, transitioned in elementary school. “It was for her personal safety of self that we let her transition,” Nikki says. But the deeply conservative and religious community proved resistant from the start to the same transition Nikki saw as vital to her daughter’s emotional and physical well-being.

Ali Goldstein/Netflix Beth Dubber / Amazon Studios

Vanity Fair Courtesy Universal Pictures UK TRANSCENDENT FIGURES Thanks to a confluence of pop-culture forces, transgender awareness has entered the mainstream, though understanding often stops at the bathroom door. Clockwise, from top left: Laverne Cox on “Orange Is the New Black;” Jeffrey Tambor in “Transparent;” Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl,” and Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot.

“We went to school and had a meeting with the principal,” she says. “It was very bad. We were told that there would be no accommodations.” According to Nikki — who like some of the parents and children interviewed in this story declined to reveal their last name or used an alias for fear of harassment and other adverse scrutiny — not only did administrators prohibit her daughter from the girls restroom, they also leaked news of her daughter’s transgender identity. “We got hate calls and threats,” she says. “We had men who said they were going to stand outside the school and protest. Grandfathers saying they would stand outside the bathroom and teach her to be a man. The principal told me there was no way she could protect my child. It got so bad we had to move.” The family relocated to a suburban community in a neighboring state, and everything changed. The girl was enrolled in the local elementary school, and things went smoothly. “They allowed her to go to the girls room and there was no incident,” Nikki says. “None of the kids cared.” But middle school brought new troubles. The administration said that Nikki’s daughter would have to use the bathroom in the nurse’s office unless she went during class, when she was allowed to use the girls room — with special permission — because there would be fewer people inside. Both options drew attention to her difference in a way that Nikki says was painful and destructive. “She started trying to hold it all day, and we had all sorts of problems,” Nikki says. Her daughter would come back from school dehydrated from not drinking in an attempt to reduce her need to urinate. She was getting urinary-tract infections, a frequent complication for trans kids who do their best not to use the bathroom. She was failing her classes. “It got to the point where I felt her mental and physical health were both threatened.” That’s when Nikki decided to pull her daughter out of school; she now takes public-school classes online. Relieved of the stress caused by the bathroom issue, Nikki’s daughter is passing all her subjects, and has made new friends through a home-schooling group. For parents of transgender kids, even the most ordinary concerns of parenting can be magnified many times. Every transition to a new school, or even within a school from one grade to another, invites a new set of negotiations. Every encounter with a health-care provider, every interaction with the educational system, becomes a delicate and sensitive dance. “My experience has been that I have to lead the whole operation and educate everyone I encounter, because it’s such early days,” says Marlo Mack (a pseudonym), the mother of a 7-year-old transgender girl who lives in a liberal, socially progressive community on the West Coast. Even there — and even among people who mean well — Mack says she constantly confronts a lack of basic understanding. “It feels like in every area you’re this pioneer. It’s a very odd feeling. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. Every time you need something, you’re hoping against hope that you will be understood and accepted.” Mack has a podcast called “How to Be a Girl” and a blog called Gendermom. She uses both forums to tell her family’s story and to document the experience of what it’s like to shepherd your child through a territory that’s only beginning to be explored, let alone understood. “My daughter just started at a new public school,” Mack says. “It’s just terrifying.” Terrifying, because there’s so much that could go wrong. In the event, though, faculty and staff have worked closely with her to make sure that her daughter is comfortable and safe. “We’re actually at a pretty good spot right now,” Mack says. “Her problems on the playground are beautifully average right now — ‘I don’t want to play with so-and-so.’ She looks like any other little girl and behaves like any other little girl.” The complications of middle school and high school are still ahead, but for now, things are stable. Still, for Mack and other parents of transgender children, painful interactions can arise at any time. Part of the problem is that even the most self-identified liberal people can have a problem understanding transgender identity. Many don’t know any transgender people personally, and few are deeply aware of the spectrum of gender identity that is increasingly being explored openly by young people and their families. “A lot of people just fall silent,” Mack says. “It’s usually them not knowing what to say.” Though too often, she says, it’s even worse. She tells the story of being at a dinner party with a group of well-educated people when one man, who works in the field of public health, begin asking direct questions about her daughter’s genitalia. “The moment you mention the word transgender people lose all common sense,” she says. “They forget basic social behavior.” Erica Maison, the mother of a transgender teenage girl in New Baltimore, Mich., says that when her daughter first started going out in public after her transition as a teenager, people would behave in ways that astonished her. “I’ve seen grown mothers whip out their cellphones and start ‘discreetly’ taking pictures,” she says, laughing. “Any kind of couth goes out the window.” She says the first time it happened she pulled out her own phone and acted as if she were videotaping the other woman, until the offender was shamed into putting her camera away. Matthew Moore, a 15-year-old Tennessee boy who transitioned a couple of years ago, says that he has grown used to fielding questions about his identity from other kids and adults as well. “I’ve been asked on the daily how I have sex,” says Matthew, who runs an Instagram account called lgbt_bros, a site where transgender kids discuss issues that matter to them. “It doesn’t bother me that they ask those questions; what bothers me is the ignorance.” Why do otherwise reasonable people so often lose their senses when confronted with the question of transgender identity? “There’s an assumption that transgender people don’t have as good a hold on their gender as cisgender people, and that’s just not true,” says Olson, who counsels transgender children and their families who are making tough decisions about hormone therapy and other medical interventions. “It’s very easy for cisgender people to roll their eyes about an experience that they don’t understand.” “Being transgender isn’t really a choice, like being who you are isn’t a choice,” says Dominik, a 15-year-old transgender boy from Connecticut. “We’re all human. We’re all just facing different battles. Just because we may be different from you doesn’t mean we have different rights.”



Gavin Grimm’s case is being used as a talking point, in very personal terms, far beyond his town. The bathroom issue has caught the attention of national right-wing groups that had for years been focused on the fight to stop same-sex marriage, a fight they lost when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of such marriages in June 2015. The Grimm case and a handful of others are drawing increased scrutiny from conservative politicians as well, many of whom are defending local control of schools. Gov. Paul LePage of Maine saw fit to weigh in on the Grimm case in mid-December, after signing onto an amicus brief on the side of the defendants with attorneys general from Arizona, Mississippi and West Virginia, as well as Gov. Pat McCrory, Republican of North Carolina. “I’m appalled at the lack of parenting that child’s received,” said LePage in public comments. The governor also misstated Gavin’s age — among other basic facts of the case — at the time the case was filed, saying, “A parent should at least prepare their child to move into a world of transgender, not just file a lawsuit at 11 years old.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey introduced the issue on the presidential campaign trail in December, contrasting his state’s approach to the policies in California. In New Jersey, Christie said, “Men go to men's rooms, women go to women's rooms and there really shouldn’t be a whole lot of confusion about that — public accommodations. And I don’t think we should be making life more confusing for our children.” He then went on to talk about how confused children are by terrorism, implicitly linking the two topics. Conservative pundits such as Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, have also inveighed against the federal guidelines about transgender accommodations, sometimes on mystifying grounds. Piper has made the argument that letting transgender girls use girls facilities is “trans-misogyny.” As he puts it in a blog post, “Surely any thoughtful person can recognize the absurdity of claiming feminism while denying the objective reality of the female.” “We empathize completely with the student and their struggle,” Vicki Wilson says. “We just want the same consideration. For the same reasons that the student doesn’t feel comfortable in the boys locker room, the girls don’t feel comfortable with an anatomical male in the locker room.” Piper was writing about another high-profile case, this one in Palatine, Ill., a middle-class suburb of Chicago. There, the state’s largest high-school district responded to community concerns by refusing to allow a transgender girl, known as “Student A,” unrestricted access to the girls changing room at one of the district’s five high schools. Their compromise position, to require the girl to change behind a privacy curtain, was rejected by the girl and her family. Represented by the ACLU, they challenged the district’s approach, and Palatine stood to lose $6 million in federal Title IX funding as a result if the OCR found they were out of compliance with federal interpretation of the law. The district reached a compromise settlement with the OCR in early December, tailored specifically to the individual student, in which she was given access to the locker room and agreed to change behind a privacy curtain. As part of the settlement, privacy curtains must also be made available for other students. The announcement of the settlement caused further rancor and confusion as the opposing parties argued publicly over exactly what it entailed. Each side issued contradictory press releases and public meetings overflowed with protesters from both camps. While no further legal action is expected, the community is still mired in discord. Vicki Wilson, cofounder of the newly formed group District 211 Parents for Privacy, said she represents many who are angry with the way the district has handled the matter, feeling that the rights of non-transgender girls have been compromised, and that the agreement’s requirements for monitoring and reporting are intrusive and costly. “We empathize completely with the student and their struggle,” Wilson says. “We just want the same consideration. We just don’t believe that constitutional rights should be sacrificed. For the same reasons that the student doesn’t feel comfortable in the boys locker room, the girls don’t feel comfortable with an anatomical male in the locker room.” Despite the settlement, Wilson’s group has vowed to keep fighting. “We lost this battle but will not rest,” read a post on the group’s Facebook page on Dec. 8, after the latest public meeting on the matter. “The importance of Board of Ed elections cannot be understated.”



In Palatine, Gloucester and other districts around the country, those opposed to the policy of personal choice in accommodations for transgender kids have received their talking points from a deep-pocketed organization called the Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes itself as “an alliance-building legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.” You may not have heard of ADF, but chances are you’re familiar with some of its work, which includes litigation in several cases regarding the right to refuse services such as photography, wedding cakes and catering venues to same-sex couples who are getting married. The Arizona-based ADF spent $39 million in 2013 — and has been on the forefront of defending anti-sodomy laws in the United States as well as in nations such as Belize, where members of the LGBT community are routinely stigmatized and terrorized. The organization fought the Boy Scouts’ decision to allow gay scouts, and has been a major force behind the efforts in states around the country to pass “religious freedom” acts that attempt to legitimize refusal of services to LGBT citizens. In December 2014, ADF sent an email to districts around the country arguing that there was no legal basis for the OCR guidelines and advising that they should feel free not to comply. The group has offered its legal services pro bono to any school district that wants to fight the guidelines, and has followed up with specific communications to districts that are considering transgender accommodations policies or have adopted them, such as the Le Roy Central School District near Rochester, N.Y. The ADF’s letters include the warning that “Granting Students Access to Opposite-Sex Changing Areas Could Subject Schools to Tort Liability” for violating students’ and parents’ rights. “This is just the Obama Administration driving a very, very political agenda,” says Jeremy Tedesco, an ADF attorney. “The whole purpose of Title IX was to resolve the unequal treatment of the sexes, male and female. The statute talks about both sexes, the two sexes. It’s written from the binary understanding, the only understanding that makes any sense. The Obama administration is trying to graft on gender identity, and it undermines the purpose of Title IX.” Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, an attorney with the LGBTQ legal organization Lambda Legal, sent a letter to the Le Roy School District in November, countering ADF’s claims. Gonzalez-Pagan says that ADF’s letter to the schools glosses over fundamental legal questions. “I think what’s important to note is that all of the federal government is in agreement with regards to the interpretation of how Title IX works, which is that ‘sex’ encompasses gender identity,” he says. Gonzalez-Pagan notes that in New York, there is also a state law, the Dignity for All Students Act, that explicitly mandates respect for students’ gender identity. As for the claims of ADF and community members that the privacy rights of non-transgender students are at risk, Gonzalez-Pagan dismisses them. “There is no instance of privacy being violated,” he says. “They don’t give examples because there aren’t any. They are going district to district to peddle misinformation. They’re coming into the school district to cause controversy where there was none in the first place.” He sees it as part of a larger agenda that is being pushed without regard to the impact on transgender students. “In the end, I think this is a controversy being created by opponents of LGBT rights in general,” he says. “I think it’s reprehensible that you have an organization that is targeting transgender children. I don’t know why they are unnecessarily being thrown in the spotlight simply because an organization wants to start controversy.”

Courtesy Lambda Legal Rowan Gillson / ADF Legal SEX EDUCATION Lambda Legal attorney Omar Gonzalez-Pagan (left) says that “sex encompasses gender identity” in the federal government’s interpretation of Title IX. Yet Jeremy Tedesco (right), an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, insists that school districts are buckling “to satisfy an activist administration.”

Tedesco insists that the ADF is sensitive to the needs of transgender kids, but emphasizes they should not be accommodated at the expense of the rest of the student body. “We understand that students who are struggling with gender identity need privacy,” he says. “The other side is just blind to the other people in the school that don’t feel comfortable. We recognize the need for accommodations for students that have greater needs for privacy — all students. What we’re not saying is that the entire school district has to sacrifice their right to bodily privacy in order to satisfy an activist administration. It’s a major sea change in culture, and it’s not something they should be able to do.”



The houses of Lancaster, N.Y., are already dressed for the holidays on Dec. 7, their neat yards glowing with festive light displays in the darkness of early evening. The parking lot of Como Park Elementary School is filling up quickly with the residents of this comfortable suburban community of 41,000 just east of Buffalo. Many of the people who get out of their cars and minivans are carrying rolls of colorful Christmas wrapping paper for a gift drive to benefit disadvantaged children. Others are carrying signs with slogans like “B.O.E. Holds Free Speech Hostage.” Tonight, the Lancaster Central School District Board of Education — the “B.O.E.” in question — is meeting at Como Park Elementary. Its members sit at a long table in front of a stage decorated with a jolly illuminated snowman. On the agenda is a final vote on a transgender-accommodation policy for the district, which is responsible for the education of more than 5,000 children, including some who are transgender. More than a dozen people have signed up to speak on the issue. The auditorium fills up quickly and soon the seats are packed, with more people standing in the doorways and the aisles. The first hour or so of the meeting is filled with awards and recognitions and reports. It’s routine, heart-warming stuff, although occasionally, the proceedings are spiked with references to long-simmering resentments over issues that have divided the community in the past — a dispute over the changing of the school mascot name from Redskins to Legends earlier this year, an unhappiness among many residents over the way the board handles public comment and questions. Several in the audience hold their signs about free speech defiantly high. Everyone knows that the main event, the transgender policy, is still to come. Finally, it’s time for public comments. Speaker after speaker steps to the podium to decry the transgender policy. Several cite the ADF opinion, expressed in a letter to the Lancaster board, that there is no legal need to comply with the state’s guidelines. Many cite deeply held religious beliefs. “Students should not be made to feel vulnerable at school,” says Patrick Uhteg, the Lancaster Central school-board president. “I’ve heard a lot (about) the minority making decisions for the majority. Let’s be very clear: The most vulnerable children in this scenario are the transgender students.” “We wish to show respect and accord and dignity to every living human being,” says Nelson McCall, a soft-spoken, white-haired man who is the pastor of the local Hillview Baptist Church. “We place, as Christians, a high value on human life. But we do not wish to put our children and youth at risk by the request of some of these folks. We are concerned for the safety, the privacy, and the spiritual well-being of our biological boys and girls, and the possibility of predators who would take advantage if this policy were adopted.” Again and again, speakers routinely express “empathy” for “confused” transgender students before moving on to voice the idea that the majority is having its rights trampled by the minority. Again and again, they suggest that students might try to pretend they were transgender to gain access to opposite-sex facilities for lewd purposes, although none of them cites any evidence for this hypothesis. Again and again, speakers express the concern that transgender people are “predators” or “perverted.” Every time, the 200-plus people in attendance erupts in applause, whoops and hollers, tossing in some fervent Amens for good measure. Many urge the board to ignore the state guidelines altogether, to defy Albany and Washington and assert their right to do things the Lancaster way. Others want to see accommodations for transgender kids put up for popular vote on the May ballot, with the tacit implication that the policy would be voted down. A lot of what they are saying is straight from the ADF playbook. “Why don’t you call their bluff?” says Mary Kless, a mild-looking older woman wearing a sparkly holiday sweater. “What punishment will there be if we didn’t adopt that policy? Why don’t you be like Donald Trump and say, ‘The hell with it,’ and just do what you want to do?” Her voice, faint and trembling with emotion at first, gains strength as a roar of approval erupts from the crowd. “The minority is being catered to over the rights and wishes of the majority, just because of feelings,” she shouts. “You’re all Americans, act like Americans! Don’t just roll over and play dead. Fight back!” It’s not until the very end of the meeting that two of the eight board members attempt to bring the question back to the reasons behind the policy. “School should be a safe place,” says Patrick Uhteg, the board president. “Students should not be made to feel vulnerable at school, no matter who they are.… I’ve heard a lot of things thrown out in terms of the vulnerability of children, and the minority making decisions for the majority. Let’s be very clear: The most vulnerable children in this scenario are the transgender students.” Uhteg and his fellow board members look drained. There’s clear consensus the policy is not going anywhere tonight. The members of the board vote 7-1 to table it until after the holidays.



The Lancaster debate highlights just how hard it is to have a civil, educated discussion on the issue of transgender accommodation, and how hard it can be to agree on the terms of the conversation, even in states like New York that have issued explicit statewide directives. Educators and administrators are caught between giant forces of social change and resistance to it. Often, in the end, they are guided primarily by their own consciences. Thomas Aberli, the principal of Atherton High School in Louisville, Ky., didn’t know anything about transgender issues when the question arose at his school. But when a transgender student came to the administration asking for accommodations, he quickly moved to educate himself on the legal issues involved. He did some soul-searching, too, discussing the matter deeply with his wife on long walks. “After doing the legal research on my own, I thought, I just want to do my job well,” he says. “I want to do the right thing for the kids, to do the right things for the school. I just want to make decisions I can be proud of in the future and talk to my son about.” Aberli’s decision to implement a policy modeled on the one used for years in Los Angeles, allowing trans kids to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their expressed gender, met with stiff resistance. There were parent protests, appeals of the policy assisted by an ADF attorney, and a “bathroom bill” in the Kentucky legislature that would have prevented transgender kids from using the facilities of their expressed gender. Each challenge went down in defeat, and more than 18 months after the policy was put in place, none of the worst-case scenarios predicted by opponents — for instance, that boys would fake being transgender to get a look at naked girls in the locker room — have materialized. Aberli says that sticking to his core values as an educator gave him some clarity during a difficult process. “It has to do with the fair treatment of everyone, accepting and respecting people for who they are, and making decisions that result in fair treatment,” he says. For David Vannasdall, superintendent of the Arcadia Unified School District in Southern California, it was a complaint filed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights with the OCR on a student’s behalf that forced a confrontation with the reality of transgender experience. “One of my best advice pieces is: When at all possible keep the attorneys out of the room,” says Vannasdall, who like Aberli was interviewed for the ACLU’s amicus brief in the Grimm case. “Then it becomes everyone trying to defend the extreme, and it quickly goes down the road of fear, and that’s when things really get bad and decisions are not made in the best interests of kids.” Vannasdall says that the district reached a new understanding on the subject of accommodations once it began dealing with the student as an individual. “We were able to sit down separately with the family and have a heart to heart about what it is they need and want,” he says. “It was so basic, it was what every parent and child wants — to go to school and focus on learning.” Both Aberli and Vannasdall now field calls from around the country seeking advice on how to best accommodate transgender kids. “We’re Christians,” one community member said at a public meeting. “We don't believe in all these different types of males and females, you know, what we have now. We have slowly watched our rights being taken from us.” The accident of geography remains a determining factor. Depending on where a transgender child happens to live, the level of acceptance can vary dramatically. On the same night that Lancaster residents spoke so fervently against full accommodations, 40 miles away in the town of Hamburg, N.Y., a similar policy granting such rights passed the school board unanimously. In the rural southern Ohio town of McDermott, where Keith Crabtree is president of the Northwest Local District school board, the controversy over transgender accommodations ended up making ugly headlines when parents in the community came out to protest the district’s decision to allow a young transgender boy to use the boys restrooms. Crabtree says that administrators and educators in the district had previously attended training sessions on transgender issues. But when the subject came up unexpectedly in real life, he and fellow board members ended up feeling squeezed between a lack of clear direction under the rule of law at the state level and a passionate outcry from a conservative, religious community. “We’re Christians,” one community member said at a public meeting. “We don't believe in…all these different types of males and females, you know, what we have now. We have slowly watched all of our rights, not all of them, but our Christian rights…being taken from us. “It puts a lot of pressure on individual school boards,” Crabtree says. “What you run into is the community that you’re in. It does work in some areas, but in some areas it doesn’t. If [the government] wants to have it be a certain way, they need to pass legislation. I think that’s a big decision to be pushed off on a school board.”

Matthew Moore

Crabtree, like many others, says he thinks schools should ultimately move to individual gender-neutral restrooms and changing areas for all kids. “If what people want is to have more rights for transgenders,” says Crabtree, who has consulted with ADF attorneys, “I think what they’re going to have to consider is private facilities for everyone.” That day may come, but it isn’t here yet. In the meantime, transgender advocates say that compelling trans kids into unisex bathrooms misses the point and can be harmful for them. Many transgender kids prefer to use unisex facilities because they feel safer there. But many others argue that being made to do so sets them apart in a way that can be dangerous or embarrassing. What they want more than anything is to live as who they know they are, and to blend in. “If I were to go to another bathroom, that would be pushing me off to the side and separating me, and I would be at risk of bullying,” says Jack, a 16-year-old transgender boy who asked to be identified only by his first name. “I often wonder if the people who think (that having separate unisex facilities) is a panacea have forgotten what it was like to be in middle or high school, what it’s like to be different, to be weird in any way,” says Olson, who has seen the negative effects being singled out can have on her patients at Children’s Hospital. “This is institutionalized ostracism. When the school does it, it gives permission for other students to act like that, and perpetuates the idea that someone is different and less than, not worthy of sharing the same space as their peers.” The mother of “Student A” in the Palatine case put it this way in an open letter about the case: “This is a difficult concept to grasp. However, just because something is difficult to understand, does not mean we should mock it or deny its existence.”



Every transgender and gender-nonconforming young person I talked to (and there were several whose voices didn’t make it into this piece) emphasized that all they wanted from school bathrooms and locker rooms was exactly what everyone else wants — a place to perform basic bodily functions in peace and safety, without being singled out as different. “The bathroom is just there for people to go to the bathroom and then leave,” says Locke, 18. “It’s not usually a whole socialization thing in there.” Locke is a transgender young man, currently a freshman in college, who started making his transition as a ninth-grader in a small town in western New York. He had to struggle all the way until graduation to get bathroom accommodations that were safe and convenient. “I don’t think it should be this hard to get any movement,” he says now. “I had to call all the people and arrange all the conferences. It was added stress to school.” Revelin is another transgender young man from New York State who came out when he was 12 years old. He is also deaf. After he transferred to a private residential school for the deaf in high school, he was relentlessly bullied. “I couldn’t escape it even in class,” he says. In a desperate attempt to avoid the ridicule and taunting of classmates and staff, he went back into the closet for the duration of his high-school years. “I decided to hide again, start dressing as a girl again,” he says. “I was lying to myself and lying to them.” He didn’t come out again until after graduation. “That’s when life started to improve,” says Revelin, who is now 22 and working as a medical technician. “I became happier and more comfortable with myself.” After he tells me his story, I ask him what he would tell people who oppose transgender people using the bathroom that corresponds with their identity. “I guess I would tell them that transgender people are people, they’re human,” he says. “They’re not going to hurt anybody in the bathroom, they’re just going to do their business. By not allowing a transgender person into the bathroom, they are hurting them more than the transgender person can hurt anybody else.” Back in Virginia, Gavin Grimm is standing firm behind his decision to demand full accommodation as the young man he knows himself to be. “Ideally, the outcome of the case would be that I was afforded my rights in full and it would set a precedent for any other student going through this,” he says. “I understand that some hopes are lofty, and I don’t know if that is or is not in the realm of possibility. So in terms of a reasonable hope, I just want my full rights.”

CREDITS: Digital Longform Editor, Joe Angio; Deputy Digital Longform Editor, Bruce Diamond; Senior Interactive Developer, Mike Sullivan