Pennsylvania School District Takes Common Sense Approach to Bathrooms

Last month, we told you about a walkout that students staged at the Perkiomen Valley School in Pennsylvania. Often, student walkouts take place for traditionally progressive causes, but in this case, hundreds of students exited the high school on a Friday afternoon to protest the failure of the district to pass Policy 720, a measure to make students use the restroom that corresponds to their biological sex.

So of course, this meant that the district would let students use their bathroom of choice. One student commented, “Kids were upset. Girls… we wanted to protect them. They were upset. They didn’t want men in their bathroom.” Another noted that she felt uncomfortable seeing 18- and 19-year-old men in the girls’ restroom.

Hmm. Boys who want to protect girls. Girls who want to have a space of their own. It all sounds perfectly reasonable to the sound mind. Naturally, such things fly in the face of the progressive agenda. But sanity appears to have prevailed in the matter.

It is not known if the student protest played a role in the decision, but WFMZ reports that after weeks of contentious debate, the board voted Monday to pass Policy 720. Students in the district will now be required to use the restroom of their actual gender and not how they identify. Some board members called the move an attack on transgender students.

One man who opposed the policy said, “We’re asking that a person that’s in a minority that has civil rights, we’re asking them to give up those rights because a majority — whether that be the population or on the board — feels that their rights aren’t as important as theirs. That is totally un-American.” However, another man countered, “We need to come together again for the kids. There’s a commonsense solution on the table, and that is for transgender students to use the single-stall bathrooms. This does the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest amount of time.”

The new policy allows students who claim to have a different gender to use the majority of single-sex bathrooms in schools. Originally, those restrooms were only available for use by teachers. It is a compromise, and it just might work.

Another proposal, which the board rejected, would have allowed students to use the bathroom that matched their gender identity; in that case, the catch was that it had to be the gender with which a student consistently identified.