Last week the Massachusetts Department of Education issued directives for handling transgender students – including allowing them to use the bathrooms of their choice or to play on sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify.
The 11-page directive also urged schools to eliminate gender-based clothing and gender-based activities – like having boys and girls line up separately to leave the classroom.
Schools will now be required to accept a student’s gender identity on face value.
“A student who says she is a girl and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day and throughout every, or almost every, other area of her life, should be respected and treated like a girl,” the guidelines stipulate.
According to the Dept. of Education, transgender students are those whose assigned birth sex does not match their “internalized sense of their gender.”
They said gender nonconforming students “range in the ways in which they identify as male, female, some combination of both, or neither.”
“The responsibility for determining a student’s gender identity rests with the student,” the guidelines dictate. “One’s gender identity is an innate, largely inflexible characteristic of each individual’s personality that is generally established by age four…As a result, the person best situated to determine a student’s gender identity is that student himself or herself.”
The new rules would also prevent teachers and administrators from telling parents with which gender their child identifies.
“School personnel should speak with the student first before discussing a student’s gender nonconformity or transgender status with the student’s parent or guardian,” the directive states.
The guidelines were issued at the request of the state board of education to help schools follow the 2011 anti-discrimination law protecting transgender students. >>>more<<<
Non-Discrimination Laws that include gender identity and expression:
Schools On Notice To Figure Out How To Handle Transgender Athletes
If high schools (and even junior high and middle schools) haven’t yet thought about how they would handle a situation in which a transgender student wanted to play a sport, they’d better start.
Certainly, that’s the case in Massachusetts, where in February the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Educationextended guidelines protecting transgender students to include their being allowed to use the restroom and play on the sports team with the sex with which they identify. From the guidelines:
Where there are sex-segregated classes or athletic activities, including intramural and interscholastic athletics, all students must be allowed to participate in a manner consistent with their gender identity. With respect to interscholastic athletics, the
Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association will rely on the gender determination made by the student’s district; it will not make separate gender identity determinations.
The department didn’t state when the guidelines take effect, or how a school would make a gender determination. In recent years, a few state school athletic associations, such asWashington, Oregon, Illinois and Colorado, have approved allowing students who physically are one sex but identify as another to compete on teams of the sex with which they identify. However, like the International Olympic Committee and the NCAA, the rules are drawn so that, unlike in Massachusetts, mere self-identification isn’t enough.
While female-to-male students are free to compete on boys’ teams, depending on the state, a male-to-female transgender must either be examined by medical professionals to determine that the identification is “sincere,” or be undergoing approved hormone therapy and/or reassignment procedures. >>>more from Forbes<<<
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