We are the UNITED States of America, and one of the important features of the country is in its name, UNITED.
When people argue about the Pledge of Allegiance, as if it is an official document or some kind of incantation, they stress the “under God” part, the part added 60 years after it was first published, mainly to counteract “godless Communism”, and at least 20 years after the Bellamy Salute that looked too Nazi was replaced with the hand over the heart, they seem more concerned with the God part and few with the “One nation” part.
The importance of the One Nation part is that, as citizens, we have had a history of moving from one place to another, and when doing so we remain citizens with a Constitution that guarantees our rights in every place we move to or from. If we need to move in order to be employed, or to live with the person we love, part of that choice should not be to assess what rights we will retain or have to give up with the move.
And, although adults have a better chance of exercising the appropriate choice, their children don’t. That is why the laws that deal with education and the protection of students while at school should not be dependent on which states their parents bring them to, but the safety and well being of all students should be country wide and a given, and not be up to the individual attitudes of each state, attitudes that are generally influenced by the personal, political, and religious beliefs of those who happen to be in power at any given time.
States require students to be in school on a daily basis, so since they have no choice on where they are to be every day of their minority, the states must have protections in place equally in all of them.
Whether or not any student should be protected should not be left up to the individual states.
Those who claim to be Pro-life should be as concerned for the safety and well being of the post natal child as they are for the fetus.
And, if politicians are going to claim that states individually have the right to determine which students should be protected, then the legislators must be well versed in all things dealing with children as opposed acting solely on political considerations.
We have seen in our history where the attitudes of individual states toward the humanity of man had resulted in slavery with the willingness to die to keep men subjugated being renamed to fighting for State’s right so it took on the veneer of patriotism. And when that ended, in came the Jim Crow laws. The state right so vehemently defended was the right to choose to which of its citizens the constitution applied.
Although Transgender people have always been here, the fact that they have come out of the shadows demanding their rights as citizens, and with many being minors who know who they are, some adults are assuming Transgender people are a new thing, perhaps coming from another world or some mythological realm that only religion can combat. They believe that their just knowing and becoming aware of them also instills some intuitive knowledge that does not need investigation or exposure to facts.
They insist that their lack of knowledge should determine whether these Americans should have rights, and the excuses for denying them those rights clearly illuminate their ignorance.
They are comfortable in their ignorance because learning new things is work, and who wants to work if they can control people while being comfortable in the lack of knowledge that came without exertion.
Call someone a bigot, and you will get a time consuming lecture about why they are not, and they will take the time to inform you of the facts that support them. Mention Transgender, and when they respond with a glaringly uninformed response, good luck getting them to give you equal time explaining the facts. Whereas they resent your holding to your misperceptions about them, they will resent your attempting to present facts and will insist on maintaining their original limited view.
Recognizing the need for universal protection for all students, President Obama’s Department of Education and Department of Justice released guidelines stating that schools need to respect transgender students’ gender, including when it comes to names and pronouns, dress codes, and restrooms. The Obama administration maintained that Title IX protects transgender students.
Of course, instead of realizing that Transgender people have been using the appropriate restrooms without incident of predation for ever, suddenly people act as if they had come out of nowhere and are intent on sexual perversion over peeing in restrooms. Having never had to fear before, suddenly people have decided, at the instigation of politicians who will save them from a nonexistent enemy and tithe collectors from imagined anti-Christs, these people now have something new to fear, and refuse to accept the fact that they do not.
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They have a new enemy, and no one, not even a president, not even science and fact, is going to take that from them.
At my age, unless I had looked down their pants or up their dresses, I have never been aware if the person next to me in a stall or at a urinal was anything other than what I saw.
We all know the awkwardness of youth, the fear in high school that we will be categorized somehow, even be given some less than complimentary nickname that will stay with us and determine what our school experience would be until we graduated. If we stayed in the home town, our future could be greatly influenced by how we were perceived and what role our peers had assigned us. Just look at the jock in high school who lived as that jock until the day he died, the head cheerleader too, for that matter, and the so-called easy girl who, no matter how innocent she had actually been is still looked on as the class slut, even if that reputation was based on nothing more than some other girl’s jealousy and self-serving gossip spreading.
It is bad enough when peers negatively assess us, but it is worse, and much more cruel if the school administration established that upon which our negative school experience would be controlled.
Peer on peer initiated stigmatizing is one thing; school system stigmatizing is a much more horrible thing.
We had White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer saying that the Panderer in Chief, Trump, would be issuing “further guidance” on the Obama directive aimed at protecting the rights of transgender students.
“The president has maintained for a long time that this is a states’ rights issue and not one for the federal government. So while we have further guidance coming out on this, I think that all you have to do is look at what the president’s view has been for a long time, that this is not something the federal government should be involved in, that this is a states’ rights issue.”
What Trump decided to do wasn’t to issue any new executive order, but to simply remove guidelines so schools can simply ignore Title IX when it comes to Transgender students, and the Department of Justice will not enforce it when it comes to transgender children.
As LAMBDA Legal put it,
“Trump’s actions do not change the law itself—transgender students remain protected by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—but abandoning the guidance intentionally creates confusion about what federal law requires. The law bars discrimination – the new administration invites it.”
I was once told by a school district administration that although GLBT students weren’t named in school policies, while other groups of students were, they were still included in the district’s protective student policies by inference. That left it up to individual students and employees to figure that out, but with no established recourse if harm came to any GLBT student from either, they could face bullying, harassment and discrimination with no consequences.
The result of this was obvious and predictable. Student safety for GLBT students was at the mercy of the adults’ and the students’ personal, political, and religious beliefs, something other students were protected from.
Now states and municipalities can choose to protect or not protect.
With Jeff Sessions as our Attorney General, it is predictable that any violations will be given little if any attention by the Department of Justice.
In light of the Declaration of Independence and the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution, it is not a state right to determine who has dignity and worth, and who does or who does not deserve respect especially if we are talking about students who have to attend school and have no control over their environment.