Washington Lawmakers Need A Lesson In Courage From the Heartland

Given the controversy over Washington’s public bathroom/locker room transgender rules that have upset so many and have been left in place by a misguided legislature, it’s interesting to note a common sense response from the heartland.
On Tuesday, the South Dakota Senate passed the Student Physical Privacy Act. According to a report by the Heritage Foundation, the bill “protects the privacy of all students in South Dakota’s public schools system by making sure girls are not required to change or shower in front of boys and vice versa.”
Heritage Daily Signal’s Roger Severino writes. “The bill requires schools to accommodate students who don’t identify with their biological sex by providing them reasonable access to alternate facilities, such as unisex bathrooms or private changing rooms, if requested by their parents. As a result, students that identify as transgender will have more options than those who do not. Yet this reasonable balance has not placated the left which is trying to bully South Dakota into reversing course under the charge of “discrimination….the Department of Education has been going around the country threatening local schools with revocation of federal education funding if they do not treat students according to their “internal sense of gender” which, under proposed rules from the Department of Health and Human Services, wouldn’t just mean male or female, but also “neither, both, or a combination of male and female.”
Right on schedule Washington had its first case of a man claiming his right to use a woman’s locker room at Evans Pool in Seattle because he said the new rules allowed it. It won’t be the last, so in the process of trying to protect a very few we will expose and threaten so many others when a simple compromise is readily available.