The Obama administration directed schools across the country on Friday to allow students to use facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms according to the gender they identify with, or risk losing federal funding.
The directive was sent via a letter signed by Catherine Lhamon of the Department of Education and Vanita Gupta of the Department of Justice.
The letter reads, “A school's failure to treat students consistent with their gender identity may create or contribute to a hostile environment in violation of Title IX," referring to a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Though the text of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 reads, “prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity,” the Education and Justice Departments stated in the letter that they would “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations.”
“This means that a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity,” the letter continues. “The Departments’ interpretation is consistent with courts’ and other agencies’ interpretations of Federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination.”
The letter directs schools not only to allow students access to bathrooms and locker rooms according to the gender they identify with, but also mentions other aspects of school that could be entangled with gender issues, such as school dances, yearbook photos, and graduation ceremonies.
“A school may not discipline students or exclude them from participating in activities for preparing or behaving in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity or that doesn't conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity (e.g. yearbook photographs, at school dances, or at graduation ceremonies),” it says.
Along with the letter, the administration sent a packet of examples and Q&As regarding how to accommodate transgender students, and what some schools have already implemented to do so.
For example, the packet included an example of Los Angeles Unified School District’s policy that when confirming a student’s gender identity, “[t]here is no medical or mental health diagnosis or treatment threshold that students must meet in order to have their gender identity recognized and respected.”
The packet explains that “schools generally rely on students’ (or in the case of younger students, their parents’ or guardians’) expression of their gender identity.”
The federal directive has been applauded by some as an inclusive and bold step from the government. The National Association of Secondary School Principals commended the government for “taking a stand” for transgender students, according to the Washington Post.
“This is the boldest stance the federal government could take to support transgender students,” said Asaf Orr of the NCLR Transgender Youth Project.
Others have criticized the Obama administration for breaching its boundaries and not allowing state and local governments to make their own decisions regarding the issue.
“Is there any issue the Obama Administration believes can be left to state and local government?” tweeted Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.
Religious leaders have also expressed concern. Russell Moore, the president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote in an article that news of the directive took him by surprise.
“If anyone had suggested in 2009 that the new president’s administration would seek to target children’s bathrooms for the sake of transgender ideology, the White House would have ridiculed it as a crazy conspiracy theory,” Moore wrote.
“There are good reasons to put boys and girls in different bathrooms and locker rooms and sometimes sports teams, reasons that don’t impugn the dignity of people but uphold it,” he continued. “Every human being knows that there are important, and necessary, differences between men and women. Without such recognition, women are harmed and men are coarsened.”
This is the first major action in terms of transgender students that the Obama administration has taken since North Carolina’s controversial bathroom law has been in the midst of a legal battle between the state and the U.S. Justice Department.
