Lila Perry
Nearly 200 students at a Missouri high school staged a two-hour walk-out earlier this week to protest against allowing a transgender to use the girl’s locker room during gym classes.
FoxNews.com is reporting that students expressed their outrage over having to share a bathroom and locker room facilities with a boy who calls himself Lila Perry. According to local news sources, Perry identified as a gay male until he was 13, but then “came out” as a transgender earlier this year. He was using a gender-neutral bathroom provided by the school but when he signed up for gym class, he decided to use the girl’s locker room. Because Perry still has male genitalia, the girls were understandably uncomfortable with the arrangement.
“I find it offensive because Lila has not went through any procedure to become female,” student Sophie Beel told Fox2. “Putting on a dress and putting on a wig is not transgender to me.”
Their parents are also concerned and flocked to a recent school board meeting where the topic of which bathroom Perry would use was the main topic of discussion.
“The girls have rights, and they shouldn’t have to share a bathroom with a boy,” Tammy Sorden told St. Louis Today. Sorden, who has a son at Hillsboro High, added that it’s not right to give Perry special treatment “while the girls just have to suck it up.”
“They should have the ability to do whatever they need to do in the privacy of the bathroom without having a male in there,” Derrick Good, a parent of two girls at the school and an attorney, told KFOR. “They have a right to their own bodily privacy, and I’ve raised my girls, and many of these parents have raised their girls, to protect that privacy. They don’t share that with members of the opposite sex.”
Perry doesn’t see it that way at all. “I’m not going to hurt their daughters. I’m not going to expose myself. I’m not a pervert. I’m a transgender woman. I’m a girl. I’m just in there to change, do my business, and that if they have any questions about being transgender, they are more than welcome to talk to me, and I’ll be happy to explain it.”
He compared the reaction to when white people said they weren’t comfortable sharing a restroom with a black person. “ . . .[H]istory repeats itself,” Perry said.
The school is caught in a quandary because refusing to allow a student to use whatever bathroom conforms to the sex they identify with could constitute gender discrimination according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
“The Office of Civil Rights has issued an opinion that says, if you do this, you have engaged in gender discrimination,” said Kelli Hopkins, of the Missouri School Boards’ Association. “At the same time, there is no case law or statute in Missouri that says this is against the law.”
A counter-demonstration of about 30-40 students took place at the same time as the walkout with the majority of students voicing disapproval of allowing Perry to use girl’s facilities, especially because the school offered him a gender-neutral restroom which he turned down.
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