By Jonathon Van Maren

The transgender policies currently roiling high schools across the United States are resulting in some strange skirmishes lately. Each of these skirmishes reveal just how far we have strayed from the common-sense instincts that once would have been taken for granted, and how much the ideologies percolating down through the culture have poisoned our ability to think straight. Consider, for example, the fact that a girl got expelled last month for repelling a boy who was charging into the girl’s bathroom. From the Washington Post:

The plot to storm the girls’ bathroom started with a Snapchat message and ended with a knee to the crotch. It all went down at North Pole High School in North Pole, Alaska — a small, Christmas-loving city southeast of Fairbanks — on the morning of April 4. The snap at issue: a student transitioning from female to male posted a selfie from the boys’ bathroom.

Some boys at the high school who saw the selfie, however, were angry and decided they would walk into the girls’ bathroom to take their own Snapchat selfie “as a form of protest,” Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Superintendent Karen Gaborik told The Washington Post.

So the boys, understandably, were upset that a biological female was in their bathroom. Their feelings mean nothing to the trans activists, who insist that all of society must transition with them and things like privacy and discomfort with being viewed by the opposite sex in a locker room setting must simply be “gotten over.” And in this case, the boys decided that tit for tat would be the right response: If a biological girl could enter their bathroom, they would enter the girls’ bathroom.

But they would not get far. The first boy to enter the girls’ room was met by a girl ― who kneed him in the groin. With that, the “protest” was over. And now the girl has been expelled, her family told The Post. The incident has ignited a local controversy as some question why the girl, who was unconnected to the transgender student, has been punished for using “excessive force” and whether the national frenzy over transgender people’s bathroom access in schools fueled the boys’ protest. Gaborik would not confirm whether the girl was expelled, citing student privacy, but said all seven boys involved in the protest were also disciplined for “attempting to enter the girls’ bathroom.”

I’m old enough to remember when a girl defending both her own privacy and dignity as well as that of her fellow female students would be lauded rather than punished. What exactly should the female response to seven boys charging into the girls’ bathroom be? Fortunately, some are making precisely this point:

Scrutiny over the girl’s punishment began Friday when state Rep. Tammie Wilson, a Republican from North Pole, publicly criticized the school’s handling of the case during an unrelated news conference, saying it sent the wrong message to young girls. (Wilson said the girl was “suspended,” which the girl’s older sister corrected in a widely shared tweet.)

“I don’t care why the boys were in the bathroom,” Wilson said. “I just wanted to make sure I had this opportunity to tell those young ladies at North Pole High School . . . if you ever feel threatened for your safety, whatever force you think you have to give, I will stand behind you. And so will your community. Not for those boys who were where they didn’t belong.”

The girl’s family declined an interview with The Post but said they will be seeking an appeal of the expulsion. Wilson said Friday that she learned about the incident from a constituent and had been in touch with the girl’s family. The Republican lawmaker said the boys were “blocking” the girl from leaving the bathroom. “Was she not supposed to protect herself?” she said in a follow-up interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

She added, “I said, ‘Good for her.’ I would have taught my daughter to do the same.”

Gaborik said that the incident happened amid an ongoing conversation within the school district “regarding transgender students at NPHS and the use of restrooms” — one that has erupted nationwide in recent years with the introduction of “bathroom bills” in state legislatures in North Carolina and Texas.

The transgender bathroom wars are having real-world consequences for high school students. Some teen girls are wearing sweaty gym clothes all day to avoid changing in front of biological males identifying as females (one girl complained of being exposed to another student’s penis in the girls’ bathroom.) Others are avoiding the bathroom altogether. Despite all this, one Illinois judge literally ruled that high school girls have no right to “visual bodily privacy”—in other words, they have no right not to be viewed naked or in a state of undress by a biological male if that male is claiming to be female. The rights of girls and women have been shoved aside in favor of the new and trendy trans rights, and now girls seeking privacy or to shield their bodies from the eyes of biological males are being called transphobic.

One day in the not-so-distant future, this generation is going to look back at the fact that they were forced to be guinea pigs in an insane social experiment by delusional adults. I do not think they will be very forgiving.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.