Judge Sides With School: Transgenders’ Feelings Trump Privacy

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BOYERTOWN, Penn. (ChurchMilitant.com) - Parents are reeling after a judge ordered their children must share bathrooms with members of the opposite sex.

Students returning to Pennsylvania schools this fall will have to contend with a loss of privacy and innocence after four students lost their case to stop the school's transgender bathroom policy.

The Friday before school resumed on Monday, U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith ruled the Boyertown Area school district can continue to allow children to choose the bathroom of the gender they identify with. Smith's opinion was that the claims of a group of four children were not sufficient to reverse the policy because "they have not shown that they are likely to succeed on the merits of any of their causes of action, and they have failed to show irreparable harm."

Church Militant spoke with David Pickup, a licensed marriage and family therapist, who works with people who want to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions. Pickup says, "The judge's ruling, in this case, is obtuse at best and harmful psychologically at worst. For this judge to issue there will be no irreparable harm, represents the height of ruling on misinformation and on a psychological issue that the court is not qualified to rule on."

Smith also dismissed the scandal caused by children witnessing members of the opposite sex in states of undress, saying, "That a male's constitutional privacy rights are violated by merely viewing a female in a locker room or even by seeing a female in a state of undress in a locker room would extend constitutional privacy rights beyond acceptable bounds."

Pickup disagrees:

Can you imagine a little girl who at any time happens to see the genitals of a boy who claims to be a girl in a private bathroom? Can you imagine this girl being put in a crushing emotional trap of being told it is her problem, and there's something wrong with her for what she's perceiving as a frightening or confusing experience?The judge's ruling is now setting children up for seeing them in my psychotherapy office years later when these emotional traps take their emotional toll.

Recently, a number of top doctors and psychologists have spoken out against the evils of transgender ideology. Michelle Cretella, president of the American Academy of Pediatricians, has even called it child abuse. Some research shows that over 90 percent of children who are gender confused end up identifying with their birth gender after passing naturally through puberty.

Scientific evidence has also proven that sexual attractions are fluid and not inborn. So strong is the evidence, that over 1,000 professionals have banded together to sign a Federal Trade Commission complaint, documenting over five years of "mass fraud and deception" perpetrated by gay rights groups in promoting the "born that way and can't change" mantra.

Pickup agrees, "Evidently, this judge believes that transgenderism is inborn and the norm, which goes against all known and current scientific research. In the end, it's always the children who suffer from agenda-driven adults who are in power. What are parents and voters going to do about it ... sit down and do nothing to protect their children?"

Legal counsel for the plaintiffs, Jeremy Samek of Independence Law Center, said:

The district's new policy permits a student to unilaterally eliminate the privacy rights of other students based simply on that student's beliefs about gender. A person's privacy rights are theirs and theirs alone. Beliefs about gender shouldn't be a license to violate privacy inside boys' or girls' locker rooms and restrooms. That defeats the very purpose of sex-separated facilities.

Alliance Defending Freedom helped the students with their lawsuit, Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, because "school officials should protect the bodily privacy of all students." They are consulting with their clients about appealing the decision because "this is important not only for our clients but for all students."

Church Militant learned that the superintendent of the Boyertown Area School District, Richard Faidley, is no longer working for the school district. The acting superintendent was not reachable for comment.

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