“Certainly, there is the potential for all transgender students to feel isolated or insecure in their school environments. This is concerning in that isolation impacts student emotional wellbeing as well as academic and, ultimately, professional success. These issues can be exacerbated when transgender-specific issues come to a head and school officials are forced to make choices regarding the accommodation of not only the transgender student, but all students in the building.Naturally, this decision centers primarily around bathrooms and locker rooms; an often heated decision in which the common compromise of isolated, private bathrooms or locker rooms for transgender students often arises. However, some transgender students, such as Lila Perry, a Missouri student, express not wanting to be segregated from everyone else. When the school district she attended offered her separate restroom facilities to use (neither the designated girls or boys restroom), she responded in recent CNN interview, “I am a girl. I am not going to be pushed away to another bathroom” (Grinberg, 2015, para. 3) Her response shows that she was averse to being treated as different from not only girls or boys, but as different from everyone, as if she didn’t truly belong with either group of peers. Students enjoying high levels of connectedness, belongingness, and strong relationships at school have been shown to have reduced dropout rates and delinquency (Christenson & Thurlow, 2004; Demanet & Van Houtte, 2012; McNeely, Nonnemaker, & Blum, 2002) and increased self-esteem and resilience (Bryan et al., 2012), factors that could certainly positively impact transgender students who, research indicates, are at risk for attrition and low self-esteem.” (Kurt, 2017, p. 8-9)

Ok, well I basically chose a whole section of Kurt’s (2017) article because it encompasses quite fully the exact point I want to address. My partner and I have had lots of discussions this past week about transgender students, just because of what’s happening in the news and because of these articles we’re reading, as well as our discussions in class. We keep racking our brains for a solution for this redundant bathroom dilemma and, as we all already know, there is no simple solution. I appreciated what Lila Perry said though in her CNN interview, that she’s not going to be pushed aside to a completely separate bathroom when she is, in fact, a girl. “Separate is not equal” comes to mind, along with all the emotional and psychological repercussions of forcing children into separate spaces. We can do better! And this is simply history repeating itself. For the ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education, it was declared that separate public schools for black and white students is unconstitutional; therefore, how would it make sense that separate bathrooms for heterosexual and LGBTQ students be constitutional? To appropriately and safely enforce the ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education, police officers had to escort Ruby Bridges to school every day. Well, the same treatment needs to be offered to LGBTQ students then. It may take an entire generation, but until LGBTQ students using the same bathrooms as heterosexual students is normalized, schools need to find a way to employ police officers to stand in front of all bathrooms to ensure access and safety for all students. There’s a whole lot more I want to say about this topic, but I’ll leave it at that for now.