There seem to be enough of these cases at this point where things are going to come to an impasse and require a solution at the national level. At one high school in a large Illinois school district, a “transgender girl” has insisted on using not only the girl’s bathroom, but the locker room as well. The parents are apparently backing the kid up, filing a federal complaint and insisting that the accommodations already made are not good enough. (Yahoo News)

A transgender student, who identifies as female, has voiced frustration after Palatine-based Township High School District 211, Illinois’ largest high school district, denied her plea for full access to the girls’ locker room.

The district has not identified the transgender student, who has spent several years living as a girl, or which of the district’s five high schools that she attends.

The district denied the student’s request citing privacy concerns for the rest of their students. The Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights already ruled that transgender students should be granted unrestricted locker room access. A violation of this ruling could be deem discriminatory, a decision that threatens withdrawal of federal education funding.

This student may have been “living as a girl for several years” but he’s still a male through not only objective reality, but in the eyes and minds of some of the girls at the school as well. A gender neutral bathroom was apparently already available, but the real issue came with the locker room situation. The school offered him “a private locker room” in 2014 but that was refused because his parents said such an arrangement made him feel “stigmatized.”

This is one case where the school is apparently showing at least some degree of common sense and pointing out that the discomfort of one student doesn’t overrule the discomfort and privacy concerns of hundreds – or thousands – of others. Unfortunately for them, the parents have at least some measure of documentation from the Justice Department on their side, based on an opinion they offered in a different case in June. (Washington Examiner)

The Department of Justice argued in a brief to a federal court on Monday that transgender high school students should be able to use school restrooms that match up with their gender identity, and can’t be forced by the school to use the restroom that matches up with their physical characteristics.

It’s the first time the federal government has tried to make the case for this transgender right in a courtroom.

Justice’s Civil Rights Division filed the brief on behalf of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia high school student who identifies as a boy, even though Grimm was born female.

That case may have been a bit easier to force through since it dealt with a girl who was identifying as a boy and the odds are that most of the boys weren’t going to complain all that much about a girl in the locker room. When you reverse the genders however, problems quickly arise. (Apologies to all of you who want to pretend there are no differences between the genders, but that’s just reality.)

In that brief, Justice allowed that not every school could be forced to have only gender neutral bathrooms and locker rooms, but that “a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.” They go on to encourage the school “to offer the use of gender-neutral, individual-user facilities to any student who does not want to use shared sex-segregated facilities.”

That position is crazy enough to begin with, but Justice almost gave themselves an out here. While it’s expensive and does nothing to address the fact that parents are allowing their kids to go to school dressed as the wrong gender, an extra bathroom could at least solve the court challenge part of things. Unfortunately, the way they worded their brief only said that the extra facilities were only for students who didn’t want to use a single sex facility. That does nothing to address this situation in Illinois where the boy is insisting on using the girl’s locker room and showers.

Perhaps we simply need an avalanche of these cases to hit the system so that we can get one run all the way up to the Supreme Court. This insanity is not only damaging to the children, but it’s once again giving activists the chance to stamp on the rights of the majority to accommodate the few. The rest of the students have rights as well, and that includes allowing teenage girls a place to change and shower without having boys in there with them. If the court can’t manage to admit that much we may as well light a match and just burn the whole joint down because we’ve reached the point of no return.