Thus far, at least ten states have enacted laws restricting access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers in public schools to students based on their actual gender, not their self-declared “identity.” Similar bills are in the works in other states. You might be tempted to dust off your hands and declare this a job well done and move on to the next issue. But as some of these states are already finding out, it’s not that simple. Not only are these laws already facing court challenges and having holds placed on them by judges, but in some cases, school districts are simply defying the law. That’s what happened in North Dakota, where the largest school district in the state vowed to simply ignore the law. And when legislators attempted to take action against the district, they ran into a legal brick wall. (Associated Press)
When North Dakota restricted what bathrooms transgender students can use in public schools and universities this year, the school district in the state’s largest city promised to ignore the new rules. A Republican legislator then called for confiscating its state funding, but the law doesn’t include that possibility.
The defiance in Fargo shows that it’s not exactly clear how bathroom laws will play out in local communities after being enacted in at least 10 states with Republican-controlled legislatures.
Kansas’ GOP attorney general planned to discuss his state’s law Monday, five days before it was to take effect. His view is likely be challenged.
This is apparently where we’ve arrived in the current era where many public schools have been taken hostage by the woke brigade. If you change the state laws to restore normal levels of order, the leftist school boards will simply ignore the law. And what do you do then? Most of these laws don’t contain any serious criminal provisions that would justify calling in the police to begin arresting people, assuming you could even convince a cop to do so. And the optics of it would be simply awful if you did.
Noncompliance by the school boards isn’t the only potential problem. Implementation at the local level can be complicated as well. Some aggressive trans students may simply keep using the facilities as they wish and if none of their fellow students drop a dime on them, nothing will change. Also, school administrators could announce a new policy in compliance with the law but then just turn a blind eye to anyone who continues to violate the rules.
Enforcement becomes even more problematic when individuals or families engage in deception. We previously discussed a school in Oklahoma where one family enrolled their son in high school without informing the school that the boy was trans. He wound up severely beating a girl in the school’s girls’ room before being removed.
The reality is that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the boys from the girls and the men from the women sometimes in the wacky 21st century we’re currently trying to live through. The challenge is probably even more difficult when it comes to children who have been given special gender training in transgender summer camps where they learn to “pass” more easily.
The issue isn’t limited to trans people, either. The AP report quotes one Kansas state legislator named Susan Ruiz. She’s a lesbian with a very particular hairstyle and clothing choices. She claims that she has been harassed by men when she enters a lady’s room because they think she’s a male. And looking at some of her photographs, that’s probably a fairly easy mistake to make.
If it wasn’t obvious already, the world is going crazy at the moment, at least from the perspective of a solid majority of Americans who still adhere to traditional values and basic common sense. And legislative remedies that we previously believed could correct some of these perplexing and occasionally dangerous situations may no longer be the type of functional relief we long assumed they were. What we really need is a pandemic of sanity to spread across the country to counter the social contagions that are currently plaguing us.
