A Minnesota middle school is being sued for not allowing a female student to change in the boys’ locker room. The student’s mother, Helene Woods, claims that this was an act of discrimination and has filed a lawsuit against Buffalo Community Middle School. Her daughter began to identify as a boy when she was eleven, changed her name to Matt, and asked to be referred to with masculine pronouns. In September of 2015 she made it clear to school officials that she wanted access to the boys’ bathroom and locker rooms. The school offered her access to a single-occupancy bathroom instead.
The school made special arrangements for Matt, but according to her mother, these were not the right special arrangements. Buffalo Community Middle School made accommodations that rightly acknowledge that Matt is female, and as such, did not arrange for her to disrobe in the boys’ locker room. In the lawsuit, this is being described as an act of isolation.
Preventing a student from disrobing in front of a member of the opposite sex is not an act of harmful isolation. Rather, it is a protection of everyone involved. Unfortunately, many adults have bought into a radical sexual agenda that not only permits but encourages policies that remove privacy protections and place children and teenagers in harm’s way, regardless of objections from the student body.
Policies that allow students to use facilities designated for the opposite sex ignore real concerns brought up by other students. Take the recent decision from Chicago school district 211 granting students access to locker rooms based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex. After the vote, a female student athlete tearfully told the camera, “My privacy is being invaded… I was hoping that they would go about this in a different way that would also accommodate students such as myself.”
I teach history, literature, and logic for high school and middle school students at a private school. My interactions with my students frequently serve as a reminder that being a teenager is tough. The teen years come with plenty of stress and discomfort to navigate without piling on the additional expectation that students should silently accept school policies that require them to disrobe in front of a member of the opposite sex. Students deserve to be treated with dignity and have their basic privacy rights respected, and they should not be silenced or stigmatized for raising concerns about school policies that infringe those rights.
Matt Woods shared with the Star Tribune that she has dealt with a number of mental health struggles in recent years. These kinds of struggles are tragically common among teenagers and in many cases, including Matt’s, are closely accompanied by discomfort over body image. Sadly, the adults in her life have responded by encouraging to believe that she was born in the wrong body. Pushing a teen to transition and live under the pretense that they are a member of the opposite sex is not a truthful or compassionate solution, and is increasingly done at the expense of the privacy, safety, and emotional wellbeing of their peers.
Scott Thielman, the superintendent of Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose schools has responded to the lawsuit saying, “The District respects the rights of all students and plans to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” Thielman and Buffalo Community Middle School are right in defending policies that protect the privacy of all students. This is not discrimination, this is care for student safety and well-being.
