Editorial: Continue allowing trans students bathroom access

After the superintendent sent home a letter about an already-existing policy permitting transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice, dozens of parents came out for a school board meeting Monday at Pine-Richland High School in Pine Township, Pennsylvania.

The letter’s purpose — to “introduce an emerging societal topic at the local, state and national levels related to transgender students and people” — said since the advent of the bathroom policy, no “inappropriate actions on the part of any student” have occurred.

And yet some parents are — wrongly — upset about the old news.

Many parents at the meeting expressed concerns about the prospect of their children having to share a bathroom with someone who is transgender, citing safety concerns and suggesting an opt-in policy.

But there’s no data suggesting transgender people have ever impeded upon a non-trans person’s safety in a restroom.

Vincent Villano, the director of communications for the National Center for Transgender Equality told millennial media company Mic that there is no statistical evidence suggesting any instances of transgender people harassing non-transgender people in a public restroom.

“Those who claim otherwise have no evidence that this is true and use this notion to prey on the public’s stereotypes and fears about transgender people,“ Villano said.

Statistics do show, according to the Williams Institute, that transgender people face significant levels of discrimination and harassment simply when trying to use the restroom. If a student can’t safely go to the bathroom, they aren’t going to switch to a differently gendered bathroom — they’re just not going to go, forcing them to focus on their bladders instead of the lesson plans.

If schools are dedicated to providing each and every student an equal learning experience, transgender students shouldn’t have to sacrifice their education to worry about where they have to take their next restroom break.

It’s the school’s responsibility to accommodate the needs of each of their students — transgender or not. This means making — and in this instance, keeping — inclusive bathroom policies for transgender students.

“Our purpose is to live the life that we want to live, which I think is what all of us are trying to do, so it would just really help if we could just use the bathrooms that we feel we most define with,” Erika Ridenour, a student at Pine-Richland told WTAE.

Reacting negatively to transgender inclusion primes high schoolers to fear and alienate transgender students.

Inclusive bathroom policies do more than just ensure greater equality for transgender students. They teach us a valuable lesson in empathy that lasts after any graduation date. But we can’t learn these lessons unless our teachers and mentors in high school provide an environment conducive to learning them.

Building that environment starts with assuming transgender people, along with all of their peers, do not present a risk of harming others by virtue of using the bathroom that aligns with their identity. It starts with rejecting statements that allude to transgender peers as people with ulterior motives.