GARDNER, Kansas (LifeSiteNews) – In another blow for the gender-fluidity agenda, the Gardner Edgerton school board in Johnson County, Kansas voted 5-2 Monday to limit both school restrooms and sex-specific athletic teams to actual members of the appropriate sex but also to have teachers keep a student’s gender confusion confidential.
The Kansas City Star reported that the policy, which defines access to facilities and teams by a student’s biological sex as recognized at birth, elicited student protests and opposition from groups such as the state chapter of the so-called American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
But supporters say the measure, motivated by parental concern (including some parents who have threatened to take their children out of the district), is necessary both for student safety and to give educators clear direction in the rules.
Under the policy, gender-confused students may opt to use unisex restrooms. A proposal to spend $80,000 constructing additional unisex and special-needs restrooms at Gardner Edgerton High School was voted down 5-2, determining more study was needed as to whether the restrooms were necessary, and in the meantime existing facilities could be modified more affordably.
The board also voted 5-2 for a policy requiring parental approval to change a student’s name or pronouns on official documents, although it also encourages staff to keep a student’s “transgender status” confidential without a student’s consent to disclose it, unless the student requests support measures such as separate changing rooms.
Conservatives argue that forcing children and teens to share intimate facilities with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status, regardless of whether they are sincerely dysphoric.
Last fall, public revolt over such policies fueled Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe for the governorship of Virginia as well as a GOP takeover of the Virginia House of Delegates, particularly due to the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls’ restroom in Loudoun County’s Stone Bridge High School.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports, meanwhile, is billed as a matter of sensitivity and respect for perceived “gender identity.” But critics argue that indulging transgender athletes in this way undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities. Scientific research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy”; therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
But perhaps most serious is the confidentiality measure. LGBT activists insist such policies are necessary to spare children abuse from “intolerant” homes, but pro-family advocates warn that withholding such life-changing information from parents leaves confused, vulnerable children entirely at the mercy of educators with an ideological interest in pushing them toward transitioning – which can have devastating physical, psychological, and emotional consequences, up to and including suicide, as in the case of 19-year-old Yaeli Martinez.