The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is forcing female students at the University of Arkansas to allow men into their restrooms. Why? A transgendered 38-year-old man named "Jennifer" filed a complaint claiming a university policy that requires men to use male designated restrooms and for women to use female designated restrooms is discrimminatory. Of course, the Justice Department took his/her (?) side, rather than protecting the safety of female students. Campus Reform has the scoop:
The university made the reversal on "advice of counsel" after receiving a letter the DOJ sent in response to a complaint that a single, self proclaimed "transgender" student filed with the DOJ's Civil Rights Division.
"Because of the stance we took, the individual filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice," Mark Horn who is the vice president of university relations explained in an interview with Campus Reform on Tuesday.
Jennifer Braly, the student who filed the complaint, calls himself "transgender" with a "gender identity disorder." Braly, however, remains anatomically a man and is currently raising money online for Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS).
Braly filed the complaint with the DOJ after the university initially told him to use the campus's several gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the women's restrooms.
"Some saw me using the women' public restrooms and complained," explained Braly in her online appeal for donations for surgery. "[O]ne problem to this is there are not unisex bathrooms in every building. Especially the two main buildings where most of my classes are, so I have to go to a completely different building to use the restroom."
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But of course, gender neutral bathrooms just weren't good enough for Jennifer, he/she just had to use the women's restroom.
The university offered to convert more current bathrooms into gender-neutral restrooms, but still Braly was unsatisfied and decided to sue.
"We tried to make reasonable accommodation and to find a common ground, converting the number of bathrooms on campus to gender-neutral," Horn from UA said on Tuesday.
A few years back I wrote about something similar at the University of Arizona:
The push for “diversity” on many college campuses throughout the country has gone too far.
The University of Arizona is one of the most transgender friendly colleges in the country according to the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies UA website.
But does this make the University of Arizona less friendly to heterosexual students who make up the majority of the university population? When the rights of heterosexual students are infringed upon in the name of diversity, the answer is yes. Examples of the violation of privacy of heterosexual students are hidden in the fine print, and many students don’t even know it is there. The restroom policy at the University of Arizona is one of those fine print policies.
At the University of Arizona, all students are allowed to use whichever restroom, male or female, that they choose, putting heterosexual students at risk for assault and violation of privacy. These “gender neutral restrooms” and the policy that goes with them were implemented on behalf of the transgendered students feeling discriminated against because they aren't comfortable with being forced to use one specific restroom.
The University of Arizona claims that the reason for implementing the policy was to avoid discrimination against gender identity. The university defines gender identity as "an individual's actual or perceived gender, including an individual's self-image, appearance, expression, or behavior, whether or not that self-image, appearance, expression, or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the individual's sex at birth as being either female or male." This definition leaves room for excuses that may or may not be true for abusing restroom access rights.
Before attending the University of Arizona, Ashley Ralston-Alvarez attended Pima Community College, where she explained an incident regarding a male using the female designated restroom.
“When I was at Pima we had an issue where a male was sitting in the middle stall in the female restroom and grabbing women from underneath,” she said. Leaving the option open for anyone to use any restroom makes room for people with the same motives as the male at Pima to take advantage of and abuse the policy for inappropriate reasons, violating privacy and the rights of all students.
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