Evanston Township High School's policy allowing transgender use of locker rooms is a serious problem for female students, a women's organization spokesperson contends.
"We believe that everyone has the right to fundamental civil and human rights protections," Kara Dansky, board chair of the Women's Liberation Front, told the North Cook News. "But the idea that students should be able to use the locker rooms that correspond to the 'gender they identify with' means that any student can use whatever locker room they want to, based on their self-declared 'gender identity.'"
The policy, adopted last spring, goes against the reason locker rooms were created, Dansky said.
Gretchen Livingston
"Locker rooms are separated by sex for good reasons, not the least of which is to protect people from uninvited exposure to cross-sex nudity," she said. "This policy is bad for the privacy all students, but particularly for female students who, as a class, are already subject to a disproportionate amount of sexual harassment in school."
The school board voted 6-1 in May to approve changes to school district policy to allow locker room use by transgender students corresponding to the gender with which they identify.
"The message came through loud and clear," board member Gretchen Livingston was quoted at the time. "It came directly from our students."
The issues falls under the purview of the Women’s Liberation Front, Dansky said.
"Women's Liberation Front is a radical feminist organization dedicated to the total liberation of women," she said. "We fight to end male violence, regain reproductive sovereignty and ultimately dismantle the gender-caste system on behalf of our members living in Illinois, across the country and abroad.
"We believe that gender identity ideology entrenches sex-based stereotypes that feminists have been fighting back against for decades."
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