Allowing biological men to use women's restrooms and changing rooms--what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty.
As a compassionate society, we believe that transgendered people should be protected from discrimination. We also believe that women and children should be protected from sexual exploitation and assault. Creating a new "right" for biological men to use women-only facilities is an open invitation to sex predators pretending to be transgender in order to get access to victims at their most vulnerable.
It is happening already even without an invitation. Take the case of Taylor Buehler, a man who was arrested in 2012 after entering a women's bathroom at Everett Community College in Washington state dressed in a bra and wig. He claimed that he was just there to use the facilities, but under police questioning, Buehler "admitted to officers that he was the suspect in an earlier voyeurism incident . . . [in which] he took a shower in the girls' locker room for sexual gratification."
Or take the case of Norwood Smith Burnes, a 51-year-old Rome, Ga., man who was arrested for undressing in front of children in a Wal-Mart women's room. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Burnes was wearing a short skirt, high heels, red nail polish and green eye shadow and was found in "stages of undress ... in the presence of several young children." After his arrest, the paper said, police discovered that he "had a long record of indecent exposure and was on probation for public indecency."
Under the new norm that the Obama administration wants to establish, all either man would have had to say to avoid arrest was that he "identified" as a woman and was exercising his civil right to use the facility corresponding to his preferred gender.
Look to our neighbor up north, where in 2012 the province of Ontario changed its Human Rights Code to bar discrimination against anyone because of "gender identity" or "gender expression"--giving anyone who claimed to be transgender the legal right to use women-only facilities. That allowed Christopher Hambrook to dress like a woman and sign into several Toronto area women's shelters, where he sexually assaulted women seeking refuge from domestic violence. He was not transgender; he was a sex predator pretending to be transgender. But nobody dared to question him because to do so would have been a violation of his "human rights."
It used to be that authorities judged who belonged in which bathroom by an objective criteria: their anatomy. But in its recent "guidance" to public educational institutions, the Obama administration declared that "gender identity" is determined by "an individual's internal sense of gender." It's all about how you feel. And no one can question those feelings. Indeed, the Obama administration said, doing so is unlawful. The Justice and Education departments declared that in public educational institutions "there is no medical diagnosis or treatment requirement that students must meet as a prerequisite to being treated consistent with their gender identity" and that "requiring students to produce such identification documents . . . may violate Title IX."
Moreover, how you feel can change--because, we are told, "gender is fluid." According to CNN, "For some people . . . how one identifies can change every day or even every few hours." For sex predators, that is awfully convenient.
By all means, schools should be required to provide access to bathrooms and changing areas where transgender people can feel safe. And there is a simple solution. As one transgender young man put it in the Post last weekend, "Imagine a room with a toilet, a sink and a door with a lock. Suddenly everyone's problems go away." But that is not good enough for the Obama administration, which insists that biological males who identify as women have a fundamental right to access to women's facilities. That is a recipe for disaster.
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Marc Thiessen is a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.
Editorial on 05/18/2016