For Transgender People, Lots More To Deal With Than Bathroom Access

Sadie Ryanne Baker. Photo courtesy of Ms. Baker

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sadie Ryanne Baker was harassed in the men’s dorm she was forced to live in until she dropped out of college. Homeless for most of her twenties, she was afraid to move into a shelter because of the abuse she'd face if she was housed with men.

Charlese Joyce was forced out of a college culinary program because of harassment from other students and her instructor.

The freedom to use the bathroom they feel safe in is important to these trans women, but it is by no means the only way their gender identity sets them up for discrimination, harassment, and violence.

Friday, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice issued joint guidelines to public schools on transgender civil rights, including but not limited to access to the bathroom of the gender they identify with. It directs schools to intervene in cases of harassment, to use their preferred names and pronouns (including on school ID), and clarifies the rules about transgender students’ participation in athletics and other activities.

More at Patch: White House Letter To Schools On Transgender Students: What to Know

And Friday afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new rule to protect individuals from health care discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Case law has been building up around these issues for a while, with the Obama administration asserting since 2014 that protections against sex discrimination in Title IX protect transgender people, too. But Friday’s guidance lays out clearly and unambiguously that legal protections exist for trans students and how schools are expected to safeguard them – or lose federal funding and risk a lawsuit under Title IX.

Alison Gill -- an attorney, the vice chair of the board of the Trans United Fund, and a transgender woman herself – says the new guidance answers a lot of questions schools have had about how to deal with records, how to protect students’ privacy, and schools’ responsibilities with regard to sex-segregated facilities for athletics and other school activities – not to mention bathrooms.

“I’m excited to see this guidance,” Gill said in an interview. “It’s something I’ve been hoping for for many years.”

A Mile and a Half to Walk

Charlese Joyce says she’s glad the federal government is taking these steps, but she’s not sure it’ll have a big impact on the staff at the community college she had attended.

Born male, Joyce says that by eighth or ninth grade, she was dressing and identifying as female and enduring constant taunting, as well as physical assaults, from her classmates -- and her own mother.

She moved from her tiny hometown of Eden, North Carolina, to the big city of Charlotte hoping to find more inclusive attitudes. But one of her instructors at the culinary school where she enrolled told Joyce that other students had complained about her using the women’s changing room to change into her chef’s whites. “Civvies,” or civilian clothes, aren’t allowed in the kitchen.

“I did ask him where the gender-neutral bathroom was, and that was halfway across campus -- about a mile and a half that I would have to walk just to get changed or to use the restroom, and then have to walk back to class. And I would still be late,” Joyce said. “Two times being late in the culinary program is an absence, and if you have four absences you’re kicked out of the program completely.”

Finally, harassment from a fellow student in class escalated to the point where both students were kicked out of the classroom. Joyce didn’t return the next day, too scarred and scared to show her face. Then she was informed that she’d missed too many classes and was being ejected from the program.

She tried to file a Title IX complaint but the Title IX coordinator at the school rejected it.

'A Lot of Courage, A Lot of Bravery'

That was just last fall – before this new guidance from the Education and Justice departments. But it was long after the federal government had drawn its line in the sand in 2014 about how public institutions should protect transgender rights.

Campus Pride Executive Director Shane Windmeyer says that was an “oh my” moment for many colleges and universities, which finally realized they needed to grapple with the issue.

“Up to that point – and this is true of almost any issue in higher education that deals with diversity – the responsibility for a more inclusive environment, a safer environment, often falls on the backs of those students that are being harmed or hurt,” Windmeyer said. “It takes a lot of courage, a lot of bravery, a lot of selflessness to do that.”

Some school districts have welcomed the new federal guidance. Superintendent Michael LaSusa of New Jersey’s Chatham School District affirmed that providing a “safe and welcoming environment” to transgender students is “a civil and human rights issue.” The district already had similar policies in place.

"That's Blackmail"

Not surprisingly, the federal guidelines were not welcomed in all quarters. Pastor Sam Rohrer, president of American Pastors Network and the host of three biblically-focused radio programs, says you can’t even call the letter “guidelines.”

“In reality, it’s a blatant act of coercion, intimidation and blackmail,” Rohrer said in an interview. “They are going to link these ‘guidelines’ to the continuance of federal funds to these schools. That’s blackmail.”

And it’s not just federal funding that’s on the line. A public school couldn’t just pull a Kim Davis and forgo federal funds in order to keep doing things their own way. The Justice Department can sue under Title IX for sex discrimination – and it has.

Rohrer claims allowing trans women use of the women’s room enables predators and provides them access and protection under law.

But transgender advocates say they're not the predators -- they're the victims. A 2011 study found that 78 percent of transgender or gender non-conforming students in grades K-12 had experienced harassment and 35 percent had suffered physical assault. Fifteen percent of transgender people have had experiences that mirrored Joyce’s, finding themselves forced to leave a school because the harassment was so severe.

"Sick of Hearing About Bathrooms"

That was certainly the case for Sadie Ryanne Baker. Growing up in a small town in West Virginia, she never heard the word transgender until she was 18 and didn’t know changing genders was something a person could do. But as soon as she found out, she knew that was what she was. She’d never fit in with other boys and was already wearing women’s clothing in high school.

Though she was already transitioning to a female gender identity, she was forced into single-sex men’s housing at Marshall University in West Virginia. She says she was harassed, assaulted, and raped. She finally left school. It was hard to find work, and she ended up turning to sex work, with its own heightened risk for violence. She was homeless on and off from the ages of 19 to 26, living wherever she had a friend who was willing to take her in for a while because she was afraid to move into a shelter.

“Bathrooms are definitely an important issue but I’m sick of hearing about bathrooms,” Baker said. She’d rather work on making sure jails, immigrant detention centers, and homeless shelters house people in accordance with their gender identity. She’d rather work on getting trans people access to trans-specific health care -- another victory partially won on Friday, with a new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services forbidding discrimination against transgender people.

Baker works with trans youth in Chicago now, many of whom are bullied at school. She knows that 41 percent of trans people attempt suicide at some point.

No wonder bathrooms aren’t her top priority.