Delaware transgender students, parents feel unsafe

Margie Fishman | The News Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Transgender teen Maddie Heeney Maddie Heeney, a transgender teen who transitioned to a female.

On paper, the state of Delaware ranks in the top tier of progressive states when it comes to protecting the civil rights of transgender people.

Since 2013, Delaware has joined a minority of states that expressly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, which falls under the umbrella of protected classes like race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

The First State also bans insurance companies from limiting or excluding health care coverage for transgender people, whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.

But those victories haven't trickled down to public school bathrooms, locker rooms, dances or field trips, say local transgender students, their parents and area activists.

As the Trump administration continues to erode LGBT gains made over the past decade, community members worry they have fewer places to turn.

"They called me a fag, a tranny," said Madison Couture, a 15-year-old transgender female, describing the persistent student bullying she encountered at Red Clay's Skyline Middle School in Wilmington. "One person called me an abomination."

In Delaware, as in other parts of the country, there are no reliable statistics for transgender youth. More than 4,500 adults here identify as transgender, the ninth-highest percentage by population nationwide.

State policy mandates that transgender state employees be called by their preferred names and pronouns and be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice. But those protections don't extend to transgender students, a News Journal investigation has found.

The state Department of Education, whose mission includes promoting "safe and healthy environments conducive to learning," doesn't track how individual districts treat transgender students and gives no specific guidance to schools, according to department spokeswoman Alison May.

"Districts are separate government entities from the state governed by locally elected school boards," May wrote in an email.

Asked if he would encourage local school districts to adopt formal policies to protect transgender students, Gov. John Carney, who admonished President Trump for rolling back transgender student protections earlier this year, responded that it was a local matter.

"I expect them to work with their communities to ensure every student can use their schools' facilities comfortably and without fear," he wrote in a statement.

Other states don't cede that control. In New York, the state education department announced last month that it would build or designate single-stall restrooms in all 1,100 school buildings to meet the needs of transgender and gender nonconforming students, and those with medical conditions or disabilities.

STORY: Transgender teen pushes boundaries to be legal

Absent state oversight in Delaware, none of the 11 public school districts that responded to questions from The News Journal has enacted a policy to give transgender students equal access to bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities that align with their gender identity. Rather, individual school principals handle requests on a "case-by-case basis," a majority of district spokespeople said, refusing to elaborate.

Spokespeople for the Colonial and Indian River school districts noted that their districts' nondiscrimination policies cover gender identity.

"We have a committee in place that is addressing the transgender issue," Colonial spokeswoman Lauren Wilson said, declining further comment.

Indian River spokesman David Maull said he wasn't aware of any transgender students enrolled in the 10,000-student Sussex County district.

In 2014, Indian River students flooded a school board meeting to protest comments made by one board member, Shaun Fink, about eliminating homosexuality from the health curriculum and promoting abstinence-only education. Fink later resigned, citing the district's "acquiescence to the homosexual agenda."

That same year, the state Human Relations Commission began investigating the Cape Henlopen School District in Lewes after reports surfaced about a teacher disparaging gay students in her class, and members of the Gay-Straight Alliance Club complained that they were prevented from wearing rainbow-colored stoles at graduation.

At the time, high school Principal Brian Donahue explained that graduation stoles were limited to members of academic-oriented and service-oriented clubs. The district later amended its policy to allow stoles for all approved high school clubs and organizations.

Earlier this year, Cape senior Arianna Carpenito, who is a lesbian, said she was so incensed by the school's lack of tolerance that she created T-shirts for her and her friends accusing Cape of supporting homophobia, racism and transphobia.

When Carpenito wore the shirt to school in April, administrators ordered her to change, explaining that her political statement violated the school dress code, she said. Carpenito later wore a similar shirt to a school board meeting in protest.

"Teachers are preaching that homosexuality leads to polygamy and pedophilia," she said recently. Four other LGBT Cape students told The News Journal they had heard similar insults from faculty.

Donahue declined a recent request for comment. District Assistant Superintendent Cathy Petitgout wrote in an email that individual schools provide accommodations for LGBT students on a case-by-case basis, but declined to be more specific.

Madison, who socially transitioned from male to female two years ago and is now a freshman at Cape Henlopen High, said she had to circulate a petition and threaten a "bathroom strike" before the school would agree to let her use the girl's bathroom.

"I don't even know how I'm going to do this," she said of the next three years.

In Appoquinimink, spokeswoman Lillian Miles said no transgender student has "requested the use of a bathroom or locker facility that corresponds to his or her gender identity."

Appoquininimk, along with Milford and Polytech, offers transgender students the option of using gender-neutral bathrooms in the nurse's office or elsewhere. That practice, successfully challenged in courts nationwide, has been criticized by national LGBT organizations for further isolating transgender students.

Three districts — Brandywine, Christina and Red Clay in New Castle County — reported that some or all of their schools open up bathrooms and locker rooms to transgender students that match their gender identity.

In Red Clay, where Madison had to use the nurse's bathroom before she switched to Cape Henlopen, administrators have no record that the transgender girl experienced bullying, spokeswoman Pati Nash said.

"She had a lot of friends," Nash added.

At Brandywine, Superintendent Mark Holodick said he has personally met with four transgender students this school year. The district is weighing adopting a formal policy to codify transgender student rights, he said.

"The topic isn't easy or comfortable to navigate," Holodick acknowledged. "At some point, I do think the state should provide guidance."

Spokespeople for the remaining eight districts, half of them in Sussex, did not respond to any questions on the issue.

The News Journal did not survey all private and charter schools statewide. But after hearing reports from students that some Delaware Catholic schools bar same-sex couples from attending school dances, the newspaper asked the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington to provide details on how individual schools treat LGBT students.

Diocese spokesman Robert Krebs declined to answer specific questions, citing student privacy concerns. LGBT policies are developed at "the school level to address the needs of the particular school community," he wrote in an email.

"The formal, written policy in all of our schools is that all students must at all times be treated with kindness and respect since all are made in the image and likeness of God," he added.

It's not surprising that Delaware schools are tight-lipped on such a politically charged, sensitive issue, said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights in Washington, D.C., which promotes LGBT-inclusive policies.

"Treating people the same may make people uncomfortable but we never as a country see that as a good justification for discrimination," Minter said. "It's a shame that this has become something that schools are afraid of even talking about."

Doing so can be a Catch-22. Taking a formal stand can expose a district to a flurry of privacy-invasion lawsuits filed by non-transgender students, parents and conservative Christian organizations. By doing nothing, a district can be sued for violating Title IX, a 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding.

Title IX protections remain in effect even after the Trump administration in February revoked Obama-era protections for transgender students in public schools. Previously, the Obama administration had urged public schools to give transgender students access to restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identities or risk losing federal funding.

Even before the Obama-era guidelines were in place, LGBT rights organizations successfully sued school districts to uphold transgender student protections.

In turn, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit, has represented nontransgender students and their parents who feel violated by policies that allow biological males to undress alongside biological females.

Heartened by the Trump administration's recent action, Kerri Kupac, the alliance's legal counsel, said many of her clients have been "bullied into silence."

"The reality is there's a reason we wear clothing," she added. "People are fundamentally private about their bodies and anatomy."

Trump's move kicked the issue back to the states and local districts. Appearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reiterated the administration's hands-off approach by refusing to say whether she would withhold federal funds from private schools that discriminate against LGBT students.

Similarly, Roger Severino, who now heads the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Health and Human Services, has argued against same-sex marriage and extending civil rights protections to transgender people.

The Alliance filed a federal lawsuit in March against the Boyertown School District in Pennsylvania on behalf of a high school student and his parents. The student charged that his "bodily privacy" was violated after he saw a transgender male student wearing a bra in the boys' locker room.

That suit came only a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court decided against hearing the case of transgender high school student Gavin Grimm, who was suing his Virginia school district for the right to use the boys' bathroom. Given the Trump administration's policy shift, the high court sent the controversial case back to the same U.S. appeals court that had ruled in Grimm's favor under the old federal guidelines.

Newark Charter School Director Gregory Meece contributed to an amicus, or friend of the court, brief filed in the Grimm case. The charter school permits transgender students to access bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

"All students deserve to feel safe and accepted at school," Meece said in an interview

In 2015, Media Matters, a progressive research nonprofit, contacted officials at the largest school districts in a dozen states that have laws protecting transgender students. None reported "any incidences of harassment or inappropriate behavior" by allowing transgender students to access facilities that align with their gender identity, the group found.

Last month, the private Wilmington Friends School held its first "LGBT+" dance open to all New Castle County high schoolers, offering them a nonjudgmental space.

The Quaker school, with 750 students, adopted a formal policy last year addressing transgender student rights, encompassing proper pronouns, access to bathrooms, locker rooms, field trips and more.

"Everything that's important to us is in writing," noted Kathleen Martin, the school's director of College Guidance.

Wilmington Friends' guidelines are modeled after another Quaker school in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The defining belief of Quakerism is that there is 'that of God' in everyone, according to the policy.

STORY: Under Trump, LBGT students fear their futures

Unlike private schools, public schools have to answer to local taxpayers who may have strong opinions.

"People still have the same rights they had before Trump pulled the guidelines," said Richard Morse, legal director for the ACLU of Delaware. But if school districts fail to adopt written policies, he said, "it's more likely people will make a mistake."

In the last year, the local ACLU has intervened on behalf of two transgender Delaware students who reported harassment and bathroom access problems at their schools. Both complaints were resolved privately without court intervention, Morse said.

The ACLU, in coordination with other national advocacy groups, has published a first-of-its-kind guide to help K-12 schools "foster gender-inclusive learning environments." Among the recommendations are to give transgender students access to all facilities that correspond with their gender identity and update school databases to reflect the students' preferred names and gender markers. Other typical stumbling points involve afterschool programs, yearbooks, lunch cards and more.

"Even in the most supportive of school settings," the guide notes, "simple bureaucratic oversights can cause real trauma for a transgender student."

Downward spiral

Delaware schools' lack of consistency in supporting transgender students has real consequences for their emotional well-being and ability to succeed, said Linda Gregory, president of the Rehoboth PFLAG support group for LGBT children, parents and allies.

More than half of transgender and gender nonconforming people who were bullied, harassed or assaulted in school because of their gender identity have attempted suicide, as reported in a 2010 survey conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality.

A more recent survey from 2015 found that the majority of respondents who were openly transgender or perceived as transgender in grades K-12 experienced some form of mistreatment, including being verbally harassed (54 percent), physically attacked (24 percent), and sexually assaulted (13 percent) because they were transgender. Further, 17 percent experienced such severe mistreatment that they left a school as a result.

The Delaware Department of Education reported six substantiated incidents of bullying related to gender identity and expression and eight related to sexual orientation during the 2015-16 school year. That's roughly one-third of the cases documented three years prior.

The state Human Relations Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing Delaware's Equal Accommodations Law, has received no complaints from transgender students in the last five years, according to Commission Director Romona Fuller.

Local LGBT advocates say that does not tell the whole story, explaining that not all complaints bubble up to the state level.

In Sussex, where voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in the recent presidential election, most transgender students are homeschooled to avoid being harassed, said Gregory, who is not aware of an active Gay-Straight Alliance at any school in western Sussex.

"Students complain that their teachers say, 'You're going to hell,'" she added.

One Sussex parent, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said her 9-year-old transgender daughter begs to be homeschooled to avoid nasty comments from her peers and school bus drivers. Similarly, the girl's mother said she has been harassed by other parents online and at the school pick-up spot for "putting little girls in harm's way."

The school, which the mother declined to identify, permits her daughter to use the girl's bathroom and added gender-neutral lavatories on each floor and more library books that address fluid gender roles. But administrators are reluctant to reprimand students who gender-shame her daughter, the mother said.

In one instance, a former friend of her daughter's publicly outed her in front of an entire class for using the girl's bathroom. Mortified and humiliated, the transgender girl refused to use the girl's bathroom for the rest of the year, and instead used a converted staff bathroom at the opposite end of the hall.

"It seems to me they are handling this as if my child will be the last transgender child to come out," the mother said.

While access to bathrooms has dominated media coverage of transgender students, local advocates say they struggle quietly to use their preferred names on school IDs and standardized tests, and to be assigned to health classes and sports teams that correspond to their gender identity.

According to Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association guidelines, transgender students are permitted to participate on teams that match their gender identity as long as the member school agrees and the student meets "minimum standards" developed by the association.

Those standards include producing an official document with the student's gender identity listed, undergoing sexual reassignment surgery, or having a doctor certify that the student is in the process of transitioning. The association doesn't track how many transgender students play on Delaware sports teams, a spokesman said.

Despite the state's paucity of data related to the school experience for transgender children and teens, Delaware officials continue to trumpet the state's record on protecting LGBT civil rights.

Last year, in reaction to the controversial North Carolina bathroom bill, then-Gov. Jack Markell and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, penned an op-ed for CNN.

In it, the pair praised Delaware as a place "where transgender people can fully participate in society, including by using facilities in accordance with their gender identities."

Starting this month, the state the Department of Education will use $700 from a multi-focused $1.8 million federal grant to offer one two-hour training for faculty, staff and parents to help navigate issues of transgender student inclusion, a Carney spokesman said.

More training is sorely needed, according to Bob Martz of the United Way Pride Council. In 2012, when the Pride Council began training administrators and teachers on gender identity issues, fewer than 15 schools statewide had Gay-Straight Alliance student groups.

That number has since doubled. The program also funds one LGBTQ case manager at Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Delaware, the first position of its kind in the country.

"We stay away from the bathroom talk," noted Martz, who prefers to review basic LGBT terminology during training. "Is every teacher accepting? Hell no."

STORY: Transgender teen pushes boundaries to be legal

Cloud with a rainbow lining

Maddie Heeney is one of the lucky ones. When classmates first teased her as a female imposter, she was too young to remember.

Now 17, the transgender girl from Wilmington bats her long lashes and wears a scrunchie around her wrist. At age 2, a family member watched the biological boy sashay upstairs and blurted out: "You know she's gay, right?"

At age 6, Maddie, who went by a different name, told her parents she wanted to grow up to be a mommy. One year later, she was in therapy, and three years after that, she socially transitioned from male to female.

Heeney's mother, Andrea Rashbaum, remembers having to pull Maddie out of her elementary school, which she declined to name. Administrators refused to accept Rashbaum's offer for staff training on LGBT issues, she said.

"Boys don't do that," was something Maddie heard often. To appear hypermasculine, she joined soccer and karate and got a buzzcut. She visited a therapist more than an hour's drive away to avoid running into classmates while wearing her pink T-shirts.

By fifth grade, Maddie was enrolled in the private Newark Center for Creative Learning. By that time, she had formally changed her name and presented as a girl.

After she was outed by a former classmate, one family snatched their daughter from the Montessori school.

Today, Maddie is one of about seven transgender students at Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Wilmington, where she has access to all amenities that correspond to her gender identity. Last year, after noticing that the hashtag #transtakeover was trending on Twitter, she decided to come out to many of her high school classmates who had no idea she was different.

"Some people don't know," she tweeted. "But (expletive deleted) it."

"There's definitely a loss," admits Maddie's father, Brian, who used to call his son Buddy. "Older memories don't go with Maddie now."

"It was society that told me I was a boy," his daughter politely corrects him.

Downstate, another transgender teen reluctantly accepts the role of proud pioneer as the only openly transgender student in her high school.

Even though substitute teachers continue to use her birth name during roll call, Madison feels more accepted here than at Skyline. A statuesque brunette, she plans to try out for cheerleading and run for prom queen. Sassy and self-assured, she insists that she doesn't care what anyone else thinks.

Yet she still yearns to blend in.

"I want to have a normal experience as every other girl in Cape," she said.

Reporter Jessica Bies contributed to this report.

Contact Margie Fishman at (302) 324-2882, on Twitter @MargieTrende or mfishman@delawareonline.com.

Accommodations for transgender students vary by school district

The following school districts did not respond to any questions posed by The News Journal related to the treatment of transgender students: Caesar Rodney, Capital, Delmar, Lake Forest, Laurel, Seaford, Smyrna and Woodbridge

None of the 11 of 19 districts that responded to The News Journal has a formal policy to deal with transgender students. A majority of district spokespeople said they handle situations on a case-by-case basis.

The following districts offer access to bathrooms and locker rooms that match a person's expressed gender identity: Brandywine, Christina and Red Clay.

The following districts offer gender-neutral facilities, such as the nurse's bathroom: Appopquinimink, Milford and Polytech.

The following districts would not comment specifically on bathroom or locker room access: Cape Henlopen, Colonial, Indian River, New Castle County Vo-Tech and Sussex Technical.