A fourth grade boy in Stafford County who is ‘gender confused’, appearing at school dressed as a woman with high heels and makeup and wanting to use the girl’s bathroom, has set off a firestorm among parents when the Stafford County Schools said the schools must allow a student to use the bathroom facility of the gender he identifies with. [read_more]
Needless to say, many parents are upset and want this ruling reversed. Parents of little girls do not want boys in the bathroom, or the locker room, with their daughters. A teacher went so far as to tell a little girl that if she didn’t like the policy she would have to wait in the hall and use the bathroom after all of the other students. It is outrageous that a child would be punished in this manner only because she objects to boys in the girls’ bathroom.
Several of our Virginia Delegates are aware of, and concerned about, these policies that have already been adopted in several Virginia counties following a ruling earlier this month by Attorney General Mark Herring. His ruling was contrary to the rulings of several previous Attorneys General. The ruling gives local school boards the authority to include sexual orientation and gender identity in their anti-discrimination policies. Fairfax County and Alexandria have already adopted these rules against any bathroom or locker room ‘discrimination’ based on sexual preferences and gender identity.
Russ Moulton, a conservative leader who lives in Stafford County, gave The Bull Elephant this statement:
We have compassion for all our kids, including those that struggle with gender identity. But this new school policy isn’t showing compassion to our girls and boys who aren’t comfortable sharing their restrooms with the opposite sex. This is a privacy issue. It’s wrong to make our girls and boys surrender their privacy, and then make them feel like outcasts because they aren’t comfortable with it.
This controversial new policy is disruptive to our students and teachers. Our teachers have enough to juggle just educating our kids. Our schools are supposed to be centers of learning: reading, writing, math, history, geography. Our schools shouldn’t be social experiments.
For decades we’ve had reasonable dress codes for our children in our schools, and those standards worked well and weren’t broken. We shouldn’t have changed it. In our public schools, boys should dress as boys, and girls as girls, or least gender-neutral, like shirts and shorts or slacks or jeans. If we can mandate our children can’t dress in a sexually provocative manner, or they can’t wear sagging pants, then we can surely re-establish and enforce these reasonable standards. No one is harmed dressing gender-neutral, and no one is saying they can’t dress as they want outside of school.
It’s time for a return to common sense.
Indeed it is! The Stafford County School Board will meet tonight to discuss this issue. If you have concerns about the ruling in Stafford county, please attend the meeting tonight, beginning at 7:00 and share your thoughts with the board. The board will be meet in the School Board Chambers at 31 Stafford Avenue, Stafford, VA 22554.
Shaun Kenney’s excellent take on the story here.
