Support Transgender Students
Dean, a seventeen-year-old transgender boy, takes online classes instead of going to a traditional campus because of his insecurities that developed once he came out to be transgender. He stopped attending regular school because he was forced into girls’ activities and bathrooms even though he lives as a boy in every other aspect of his life. He wishes to go back where his friends are, and participate in activities with them (Support All Students).
It is not fair that transgender people are not receiving the same opportunities as everyone else due to such trivial issues which can easily be resolved. Using the bathroom of their current gender is a solution to stop discrimination, and there has been major debate over whether transgender individuals should be allowed this right. Since confidence is necessary during adolescence years, and being singled out will lower one’s self esteem, and in some cases being transgender is unpreventable, transgender teens should be allowed to use the bathroom of their current gender. Transgender teens should have the freedom to express themselves through bathroom choice. Many adolescents are unsure of their identity, and being singled out from a crowd can increase the risk of damage to the teen. In February of 2015, Stage of Life conducted a survey where 95% of teenagers felt inferior, and from that, six percent of the reasons are due to sexual orientation.
Although some might argue that children will feel uncomfortable with seeing people with different body parts in the same bathroom, the transgenders should have the same equality as any other “ordinary” person, and using the bathroom of their current gender is one aspect. According to a recent Times Union article, there are 700,000 transgender people in the U.S, and a survey from Youth Suicide Statistics records that more than fifty percent of transgender youth will have had at least one suicide attempt by their twentieth birthday. Shockingly, 350,000 people in the U.S are dying due to insecure feelings about themselves.
When it comes to life or death, saving someone’s life is more important that making a child feel comfortable once in his/her life. Forcing transgender teens use the bathroom of their original sex, will make more adolescents feel doubtful about themselves mentally and physically. Many times, genetics is the cause of the gender switch in several twins, therefore transgender adolescents should not have to be the only people who are required to use a certain bathroom. A 2008 discovery by Australian researchers of a genetic variation in transgender women say that if one twin is identical, the other one has a tendency to be too. The Washington Post states that forcing transgender teens to use the bathroom of their original gender violates Title IX. Not only is this a major issue, but scientifically, “[b]iologists tell us that… [a] person who has XX chromosomes is generally considered female, while a person with XY chromosomes is generally considered male.
However, there are also people who have XXY, XYY, and other variations of chromosomes” and these people have a higher likelihood of becoming transgender. These two problems are not trivial, thus transgender teens should have full control of their own lives. All in all, transgender teens should be able to use the bathroom of their choice. Once Dean was able to do so, he felt that he had more freedom, therefore, he started attending school again and his confidence was slowly but surely building.
