COLUMBUS, Ohio — GOP lawmakers proposed a new bill that would allow Ohio schools to disclose to parents if their child exhibits signs of being transgender.

Republican Reps. Tom Brinkman and Paul Zeltwanger introduced House Bill 658 on May 15, which would require teachers to immediately notify parents if they observe any signs of “gender dysphoria” in their students.

The legislation states in its text that “if a government agent or entity has knowledge that a child under its care or supervision has exhibited symptoms of gender dysphoria or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner opposite of the child’s biological sex, the government agent or entity with knowledge of that circumstance shall immediately notify, in writing, each of the child’s parents and the child’s guardian or custodian. The notice shall describe the total circumstances with reasonable specificity.”

Furthermore, the child can be placed into treatment with the parents’ written consent, which would provide educational material, counseling and/or medical services. Teachers would be charged with a fourth-degree felony if they attempted to provide students with sex and gender counseling resources without the parents’ permission.

The measure also defends parents or guardians who decide not to allow treatment by prohibiting that the decision be used against them in custody cases or abuse and neglect complaints. Rep. Brinkman stated that a child’s struggles with mental health surrounding gender dysphoria should be “a consideration that parents make,” but should not be reason for parents to lose their right to decide what they want for their child.

The bill was prompted by a recent Cincinnati case in which a Hamilton County court hearing granted custody of a transgender teen to his grandparents after the teen’s parents attempted to terminate his hormone therapy. In the case, the teen filed a complaint stating that he had contacted a crisis hotline to report that his parents had told him to kill himself and refused to let him get therapy “unless it was Christian-based.”

Brinkman, however, was opposed to this decision, arguing that parents have the right to decide what is best for their children, according to a report from a CNN affiliate, WCPO.

Critics say that the bill discriminates against transgender youth and lays ground for further discrimination, with the Ohio Education Association and LGBT rights group Equality Ohio strongly opposing the legislation. The groups believe that it puts the livelihood of transgender youth at risk, arguing that it would enable bullying and intolerance through the “outing” of students.

“Who is the judge of which gender is allowed to do what? If Jane signs up for shop class, will her parents receive a government letter?” Equality Ohio said in a statement. “If Jordan doesn’t want to play football, do his parents get a letter? What if Alex wants to attend a meeting of the student LGBTQ group — does the school email that to Alex’s parents?”

The conversation regarding the future of transgender students continues to emerge with another recent court case, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a Pennsylvania school bathroom policy. The ruling found that transgender students would continue to be allowed to use bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identities in May.

A recent study showed that 64 percent of LGBT youth faced negative comments made by their families about being LGBT, while 18 percent of transgender people said their family was not supportive of their gender identity, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The NCTE also found that 54 percent of those who were out or perceived as transgender in K–12 were verbally harassed, along with nearly one-quarter (24 percent) physically attacked and 13 percent sexually assaulted in K–12 because of being transgender. Additionally, 17 percent of transgender youth said they faced such harsh mistreatment that they left a K–12 school while nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of people who were out or perceived as transgender in college or vocational school were verbally, physically or sexually harassed.

The bill in question has had its first committee hearing but hasn’t yet reached the House floor for a vote.

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PHILADELPHIA — Transgender students in Pennsylvania will continue to be allowed to use bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identities after a federal appeals court ruled to uphold the policy on May 24.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in favor of the Boyertown Area School District, which passed the policy on restroom and locker room use two years ago. Transgender students and their advocates took the ruling as a win, saying maintaining this policy is critical to transgender students’ well-being and safety. On the contrary, students who sued the Boyertown Area School District, said the policies violate the privacy of students who are not transgender.

The ruling was found following a lawsuit filed by a Pennsylvania school district student who aligned himself with the conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom — claiming the district is violating his constitutional privacy rights by allowing transgender students to use the same facilities as him, with five students subsequently joining the lawsuit. They argued that allowing transgender classmates to change alongside them in locker rooms violated the privacy of students who are not transgender since the space was once designated for people with the same anatomical gender. One student, identified as Joel Doe in court documents, said he learned of the policy only while undressing in the locker room and saw a transgender classmate doing the same, according to CBS Local Philadelphia.

Christiana Holcomb, an attorney with the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom who is representing the students said that the [school] administration has a responsibility to protect student privacy and safety. Holcomb also stated that the school should accommodate transgender students in other ways, perhaps directing them to use other facilities, arguing that the administration cannot violate a student’s bodily privacy.

A three-judge panel heard extensive arguments in the case before deliberating for less than 30 minutes to ultimately sustain a lower court decision, denying to terminate the Boyertown School District’s transgender student bathroom policy, according to CBS Local Philadelphia.

A lawyer working for the school district said its policy of allowing students to use facilities aligning with their gender identification is legal and prevents claims that the district violated the rights of transgender students to equal protection. He also highlighted the private and single-stall showers and bathrooms for students provided by the school district.

Ria Mar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which intervened in the lawsuit, said the district handled the issue correctly by allowing all students equal use of the single-stall bathrooms, rather than forcing transgender students to use separate ones. Mar stated that choosing to use that individual space and being required to use it because of who you are is a very different thing.

Recently, there have been two other federal appeals ruling in favor of transgender students who sued their school districts by contesting that districts excluding them from using the facilities designated for their stated gender violated their right to equal protection.

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Intersex Awareness Day (Oct. 26), marks another occasion to assess where schools stand (or sit — bah-dum-tss!) on the restroom issue. Essentially, the positions the nation’s schools take mimic the checkered tile floors of many of their restrooms — black and white, which looks grey at a distance.

Enacted in January 2016 was the California Healthy Youth Act, which, among other directives, provides  comprehensive sexual health education and HIV/AIDS prevention education to students, including discussions about and to intersex and transgender students. To clarify, the Intersex Day website defines intersex as “those born with sex characteristics that don’t meet medical and social norms for female or male bodies,” and transgender pertains to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

This state-level awareness of the needs of nonbinary people aligns with the state’s recent passage of a law that allows for a third gender option on state drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, so people can identify as nonbinary or neither conventionally male or female.

Following upon California’s position, the U.S. Department of Education, then serving under President Obama in April 2016, encouraged the nation’s school districts to allow access to restrooms that best suit the gender to which a student identifies. Later, President Trump’s appointee, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, decided against the idea of a national mandate and instead left restroom policy-making at the individual district level. As a consequence, a divisive climate of debate has seeped into what’s intended to be one of the few private places in public school.

Meanwhile, in Reno, Nev., all new elementary and middle schools in the Washoe County School District will be built with gender-neutral bathrooms, according to a local NBC affiliate, where installing gender-neutral bathrooms in middle schools is said to be $500,000. Likewise, some Illinois schools, specifically those in the Evanston/Skokie School District 65, will provide transgender-friendly bathrooms, reported the Daily Northwestern. Ditto New York City Schools. The namesake high school of Detroit Lakes, Minn., will also implement a gender neutral bathroom policy thanks to the efforts of 17-year-old Jayelin Block, reported DL-Online.

Not all local districts are embracing gender neutral restrooms on their campuses. Such is the case in Iowa, for example, where conservative Christian groups have taken umbrage with permitting transgender students to use the bathroom that reflects their stated gender identity. This disconnect is presently an issue at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, where student activist and high school senior Zoey Wagner has been pushing for a more nuanced appreciation of the needs of transgender and nonbinary identifying students.

“Every high school has to have one private bathroom that would work for this,” Wagner told the Des Moines Register. “It might not be as central as Roosevelt’s, but wherever it is, we have to make it open to students who don’t want to use gendered bathrooms.”

Though federal-level cohesion regarding gender neutral restrooms is unlikely in the near term, the debate remains part of a greater national dialogue, even when it’s only being realized between local school districts, students and their respective communities.

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For decades, the school restroom was mythologized in popular culture as an ersatz meeting place or den of low-end inequity — consider the Fonz entreating his male interlocutors to “step into my office” or Mötley Crüe’s cover of “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room.” These days, the school restroom is also terra incognita when it comes to challenges facing transgender students and the socio-political debate that surrounds them.

The issue became particularly divisive in April 2016 when, under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education pressed a handful of contentious school districts to permit transgender students the use of bathrooms of the gender with which they identify. In February of this year, President Donald Trump’s appointees, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, revoked the previous administration’s guidance, which leaves the needs of transgender students in the hands of school districts.

“Most students who identify as transgender have to use the restroom in the nurse’s office or a faculty bathroom. Most schools don’t have the infrastructure or budget to add additional bathrooms,” said Andrea Bazemore, creator of “The Black Apple,” a podcast for educators committed to bringing social justice practices in their classrooms.

Currently, when transgender students face intolerance in regard to using restrooms of their stated gender, the students either have to seek out a rare unisex restroom or find alternative arrangements within the school.

“The problem happens when you have staff that don’t approve of the student’s gender identity and won’t allow a student to use the restroom due to them being transgender. Many students’ fears about bathroom issues include adults’ attitudes toward them,” Bazemore added.

There are an estimated 150,000 transgender students across the nation, according to a report published in February by the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. Among them is Drew Adams, a transgender high school junior at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Fla., who was prohibited from using the boys’ bathrooms after someone made an anonymous complaint.

His mother, Erica Kasper, filed a complaint on his behalf with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after a resolution could not be reached with the local school officials. The complaint was nullified when the Trump administration rescinded the Obama-era guidelines, so in June, Adams sued school officials and the St. Johns County School Board. The suit was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, and alleges a violation of Title IX, a federal law that bars sex discrimination in public schools.

Adams’ suit is just one of a throng of cases being pursued across the country. The nation’s leading civil rights organizations released a letter on July 18, 2017, that contends that schools must allow students access to restrooms aligned with their stated gender identity lest they willfully violate federal law and the Constitution. Moreover, suits like Adams’, if successful, could result in hefty settlements.

To allay these possibilities and forthrightly address the needs of their students — no matter their gender identity — some schools are opting to take measures today rather than tomorrow.

Yonkers, N.Y.-based ASI Group, a 50-year-old manufacturer of washroom accessories, partitions and lockers has seen an uptick in school orders for what it terms “ultimate privacy partitions.” These are partitions that are lower to the floor and higher to the ceiling than conventional restroom partitions. A European-style partition, essentially a small room that encloses the facilities, has also proven popular.

“We are also getting more and more requests by school districts for [these partitions] even though there isn’t legislation in place in most, if any, places,” said Cyrus Boatwalla, head of global marketing at ASI Group. “School districts are recognizing that it may come down the pike or they want to be more proactive in that area.”

Another means of navigating real-world needs of school restrooms comes from the virtual world. Concept3D, a digital mapping company with offices in Colorado and Minnesota, created the CampusBird, an interactive map and virtual tour platform. When implemented by a learning institution and used on a mobile device, it enables transgender students and others to find gender-neutral bathrooms (and a bevy of other resources) without risking the confrontation that might result when asking a stranger.

“It’s a way to put those resources at the fingertips of students when they need them,” said Concept3D Marketing Manager Samantha Slater.

Colleges across the nation, including Colorado State University, Harvey Mudd College and the University of California, Irvine, among others, have embraced the platform to help students find everything from meditation and lactation spaces to gender-neutral bathrooms.

“If it’s not something you face everyday, you may not know how to answer. Also, a stranger may not react in a great way or simply may not know where every gender-neutral bathroom is on campus,” said Slater.

Of course, these solutions cost money — a resource often in short supply to cash-strapped public schools. Boatwalla, however, thinks the human cost of not implementing such measures should also be considered.

Read the entire article in the July/August issue of School Construction News.

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