Parents Sue After Transgender Child Banned From Girls Bathroom At School
A Colorado six-year-old just wants to go pee with the girls and get on with her day, but her local school has said she has to use the boys bathroom or the nurse's office.
Coy Mathis was born a boy but has self-identified as a girl since she was a toddler. She has been diagnosed by a doctor and her passport says she is a girl. But the school says concern for the psychological well-being of the other students at the school lead to the ban.
The parents have lodged a discrimination suit against the Colorado civil rights division and is homeschooling Coy until the matter is resolved. In an interview with Canada AM, they say they are hurt and confused by the school's decision and are speaking out in the hopes of increasing awareness.
Parents of transgender kids have a lot of hard decisions to make to try and make life easier for their kids. I wrote a story on this very topic for Today's Parent magazine. I spoke to parents of both boys and girls whose kids preferred to dress in opposite gender clothing and play with atypical toys.
Most of these parents -- especially the ones with boys -- spoke about their own discomfort allowing their children to be in public in opposite gender clothes. Their number one concern is about bullying. Generally, they just want their children to be happy and accepted. These parents choose to love their children unconditionally; it doesn't matter to them if they are girls, boys or a hybrid that is their's alone.
When it comes to gender identity issues in kids there is a spectrum; for some it is a phase, for others it is a part of who they are, and for a very small amount of kids the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body is persistent and has to be dealt with in some way or another.
One of the experts I spoke to said that now that social norms are loosening up, we are seeing more kids who play with gender expectations -- some will grow out of it, and some will not.
These kids challenge our notions of what it means to be masculine and feminine and we have a lot to learn from them.
One mother said after her son wore a dress to school: “I think that there are way more sparkly, girlie boys out there than we realize,” says Robin. “And I think they’re really going to show us newer and different ways to think about how we teach and about how we imagine gender and childhood.”
This topic can make people extremely uncomfortable but what would you do if it was your child? Wouldn't you stand up for their right to define themselves by whatever terms they chose?
Dateline ran a report on one transgender girl. Watch this and you can see how hard it is for the parents to see their child suffer.
For more on Josie, you can find Part Two here that describes some of the medical controversy, and a letter Josie wrote here. For more information, the New York Times ran an extensive story on Pink Boys in the summer.
Want more chaos? Last year, I wrote about introverts living in an extrovert's world. This is still a very big topic.
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