EDITORIAL: Education Department’s transgender locker room mandate crosses line

Americans are an exceptionally tolerant and understanding people. Time and again, entrenched prejudices have given way to acceptance. And cultural shifts are happening faster than ever. Racial and gender barriers have fallen, gay marriage is the law of the land and transgender people, long ridiculed and marginalized, are widely accommodated and supported.

But transgenders, who are born as one sex but see themselves as another, are impatiently demanding a level of social recognition the country clearly isn't ready to provide. So much so, in fact, that they're welcoming heavy-handed federal interventions and causing a backlash that might undermine newfound public acceptance.

Monday brought a seismic moment for transgender policy. A federal office ordered an Illinois school district to allow a boy who identifies as a girl unrestricted access to the girls' locker room to change clothes and shower. In ruling that the school district discriminated against the student by forcing her to change clothes and shower behind a curtain in the girls' locker room, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights gave High School Township District 211 30 days to comply or face penalties that could include the loss of all its federal funding.

The school and its students have been far more accommodating than other public education systems around the country. The student, who is undergoing hormone therapy, is addressed by her female name and plays on a girls' sports team.

But no accommodation can change the fact that the student remains a boy biologically. The U.S. Department of Education, in ordering a school system to allow a boy to disrobe and shower in an open space where girls might be doing the same, if he wants to, is well outside the mainstream and completely disconnected from social norms. By asserting that a transgender student has a right to dress and bathe in a locker room of his or her choosing, the government is ignoring the right of every other student to have some measure of privacy and not be exposed to the opposite sex in a state of undress.

The Department of Education decision, the most clear and far-reaching of its kind, is potentially precedent setting. Every public school system in the country now is on notice that identical allowances must be made for transgender students who ask for them, regardless of how students of the opposite sex and their parents might feel about it.

A locker and shower room is completely different from a bathroom, which has stalls with doors. A typical public bathroom provides all people with enough privacy to make transgender use invisible and completely moot.

But even bathroom use by transgenders is a bridge too far for a lot of Americans. Polling data are slowly shifting toward greater public support for allowing transgender people to use public bathrooms that match their gender identity, but a Tuesday vote in Houston buried the notion that the majority hold such a position. By a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent, Houston voters rejected a broad anti-discrimination ordinance that included a provision to allow transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice.

Far from a redneck metropolis, Houston voters backed President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and have elected their lesbian mayor three times. But the ordinance she championed was forced on her city, then forced onto the ballot in a legal challenge. Imagine what the margin would have been if the issue were locker rooms and showers in public schools.

This is precisely why a de facto national education policy regarding transgender students came from the Department of Education's activist Office of Civil Rights, not an act of Congress. Legislation that mirrors the department's Illinois ruling would have no chance of passing, and it's hard to imagine a court ordering schools to allow boys and girls to change and shower together, because bestowing a "right" for someone shouldn't infringe on the rights of others. That a handful of people with no stake in their decisions have the power to strip a school of federal funding perfectly illustrates why Washington should have a greatly diminished role in public schools.

Not every person who opposes this decision is bigoted or transphobic. They recognize that there is a line that transgender youth shouldn't be able to cross in living as a member of the sex they are not.

The Illinois system had a more than reasonable solution to the transgender student's demands. The reality is that no teenager is comfortable in a locker room setting, regardless of gender or gender identity. Locker rooms at new private gyms and clubs provide better privacy than the embarrassingly wide-open layouts of yesteryear. Schools eventually will move in that direction. Until that happens, they might have to mandate privacy curtains for everyone to avoid transgender discrimination claims. But forcing the issue won't build goodwill.

This newspaper supports anti-discrimination protections for transgender Americans. Preventing a biological boy from undressing and showering in front of girls isn't discrimination. It's common decency.