Obama Wades Into The Potty Issue

courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain

The news today reported that President Obama is poised to issue a sweeping order demanding all public schools, from coast-to-coast and from pre-K to college, allow transgender, and those who claim to be transgender, to use the restroom appropriate to the gender with which they identify.

Naturally this has caused a huge kerfuffle across the political and idealistic spectrum. The liberal left is, for the most part, much in favor of the order. The conservative right, by-and-large, are appalled by the order. I don’t think those reactions surprised anyone.

After we watched the in-class news program this morning I asked my students if they had heard about the impending announcement from the White House. The level of the students’ disgust at the idea was enlightening. Not a single one was in favor of the law, and more than one, most notably among the female students, were vehemently opposed to the idea that a boy could claim to feel like he was really a girl and use the girls’ restroom.

My students were having a hard time understanding why President Obama and other left wing politicians are so much more concerned with the feelings of the transgendered than they are with the feelings of the traditionally gendered. One young lady told me that when this new rule goes into effect she guessed she would just have to quit using the bathroom at school. Several of the other young ladies in my class agreed with her. More than a few of the young ladies indicated that any boy who went in the girls’ bathroom would be made to feel very unwelcome.

I cautioned the students to be very careful about what they might say and do should this new rule be instituted.  It would be very easy for them to wind up with a write up for bullying if they made a transgender person feel threatened for using the bathroom they mentally and emotionally felt appropriate, even if the equipment they were born with indicated otherwise. I explained as best I could why truly transgendered individuals don’t choose to feel the way they do; it is in their genes.

Interestingly enough, not one of the young men in the class voiced any opposition to the idea of a girl to boy transgender student using the boys’ bathroom. Now I wonder why that was?

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator