A public-school board in Virginia (Gloucester County Schools) has been court ordered to pay a $1.3 million dollar settlement to a transgender student who wanted to use the boys’ bathroom.

“Gavin Grimm” was born a biological female in 1999, but eventually underwent a legal name change in her freshman year and reconstruction and hormone therapy treatments to transition to her desired status of being considered a male. (Throughout this article, the author will refer to Grimm as a biological female to avoid unnecessary confusion.)

In an attempt to accommodate Grimm, the school built a single-stall restroom as an “alternative” for students with “gender issues.” Apparently, the concession from the school wasn’t good enough for Grimm. Grimm reportedly occasionally refused to use the provided restroom and in 2015 embarked on a six-year court battle to earn the legal right to use the boys’ bathroom (even though she has long since graduated from the school herself).

According to the court decision, “Grimm suffered from stigma, from urinary tract infections from bathroom avoidance, and from suicidal thoughts that led to hospitalization.”

Judge Henry F. Floyd of the Fourth Circuit Appeal Court wrote the majority opinion, in which Judge James A. Wynn joined. Their decision, straight out of Critical Legal Studies, sounds more like an LGBTQIA+ apologetics manual than a legal ruling: “There is no question that there are students in our K-12 schools who are transgender. For many of us, gender identity is established between the ages of three and four years old.”[i]

The justices go on to assert:

“Of course, there are other gender-expansive youth who may identify as nonbinary, youth born intersex who do or do not identify with their sex-assigned-at-birth, and others whose identities belie gender norms. See generally PFLAG, PFLAG National Glossary of Terms (July 2019 – website omitted — explaining that ‘transgender’ is ‘also used as an umbrella term to describe groups of people who transcend conventional expectations of gender identity or expression’)”[ii]

This legal battle regarding transgenderism in schools will help establish case law precedent around the nation. The usual suspects were involved. When it comes to cases involving the destruction of morality and the traditional family, we expect to see the ACLU on scene, and they did not “disappoint.”

Grimm’s case was elevated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, who decided not to hear it, thus allowing the favorable Fourth Circuit Court decision to stand. Immediately, Grimm turned her activism to other school boards.

Speaking recently to the nearby Newport News public school board, Grimm said, in what sounded like a legal threat: “I’m speaking to you to make it very clear that discrimination is an open-and-shut conversation here in the Fourth Circuit in Virginia, and it’s very expensive.” She also said: “Any further resistance to affirming the transgender young people in this county is an act of aggression to these students and an act of political preservation by members of the school board.”[iii]

The school board quickly changed their school’s policy and will allow transgender students to use the restrooms of their choice moving forward.

What Could This Mean for Students?

According to the Fourth Circuit Court, there are approximately 150,000 transgender students in the United States today. Now that Grimm has successfully won a heavy lawsuit against a public school, most schools will not risk paying out millions of dollars. They will do as Newport News did and throw open the bathroom and locker room doors as a free-for-all. Far from providing security and protection this puts many students at risk.

One example is the case of an 18-yr-old female student in Seattle, WA who was attacked in a gender-neutral high school bathroom by a male football player named Demonte Rigney. She was forced against her will to perform sex acts on him. [iv]

Another is a 5-yr-old girl in Decatur, Georgia who, because of the school’s pro-transgender policies allowing boys in girls’ bathrooms, was attacked by a male student who identifies as “gender fluid”. The predator student “forcibly touched her genitals despite her protests, causing her both pain and fear.”[v]

The courts are clearly deciding that the rights of some students who pretend to be (or believe to be) of the opposite gender (less than 1% of all students) trumps the right of all students to be assured of their safety on a school campus.

Too many parents hold to the naïve assumption that the public schools of today are the same as the ones they grew up in. Nothing could be farther from the truth! Today’s public school system is an absolute tsunami of leftist indoctrination on topics ranging from Marxism to Critical Race Theory, to gender fluidity, to naturalistic atheism. It is anything but neutral and has strayed far from promoting true academic education.

It is well past time for parents to remove their children from the immoral government school system and choose explicitly Christian education.

Footnotes

[i] https//www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/191952.P.pdf, p. 11.

[ii] Ibid, p. 12.

[iii] https://www.dailypress.com/news/education/dp-nw-newport-news-special-meeting-trans-policies-20210827-pmm3vs4kabdnxda6vcvwqmhuta-story.html

[iv] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/ballard-high-student-charged-with-on-campus-rape/797502564/

[v] https://adfmedia.org/press-release/us-opens-investigation-sexual-assault-minor-child-georgia-violation-title-ix

One of the most effective ways that Marxists advance their agenda is to change how we talk about things.   When clever rewordings replace the truth, it’s easier to fool people.

For example, the Washington Post this past week said a transgender plaintiff “was designated female at birth, but identifies as male.”

In the blink of an eye, a biological fact – that someone was born a girl – is brushed aside and replaced with a term that implies that male or female sex is assigned, not a natural phenomenon.

In fact, the idea that your sex is “assigned at birth” is an increasingly common description. It validates the Gnostic-based insanity that one’s sex has nothing to do with physiology, just what goes on in people’s heads.  By this reasoning, birth records can be altered to distort reality, which is a way to lie officially.  And to force others to do so as well.

Gavin Grimm, who is now 21, sued the Gloucester County, Virginia school district in 2015 to force them to allow her to use boys’ facilities.  Two years later, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court but was set aside when President Donald Trump overturned a Barack Obama gender identity school mandate.

But last Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the school board had violated Grimm’s 14th Amendment right against sex discrimination. The high school had offered a gender-neutral bathroom, but the plaintiff’s attorneys rejected that solution, as did the two Obama appointees who sided with Grimm. A George H.W. Bush appointee dissented.

They drew from the bizarre Bostock opinion in June written by, of all people, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, which expanded the definition of “sex” in the Civil Right Act of 1964 to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  Just like that, the Court put every institution in America that won’t kneel to the LGBTQ gods in jeopardy of ruinous lawsuits or even governmental sanctions.

Given the Court’s reasoning, how could any sex-based distinctions, predicated on real and important differences between the sexes, be maintained? Sports teams? Locker rooms? Bathrooms at any business of any size? Private schools?

The transgender movement, for all its caring rhetoric, is not really about eliciting compassion for sexually confused people – something we should embrace. It’s part of the Marxist Left’s campaign to overhaul society and force people to lie.

Anyone not toeing the line, which keeps changing, is “canceled.”  That means being censored, fired, shut out of promotions or jobs, and de-platformed on social media.

Over the years, the Left has peppered our discourse with advocacy-filled descriptions. “Choice” long ago replaced abortion, “gay” replaced homosexuality, and “hater” and “racist” became all-purpose descriptors for anyone dissenting from the Left’s worldview. Erasing biology is just more of the same.

Sometimes, the ideologically-driven changes are more subtle. Journalists now capitalize racial terms, as in Black people and White people. The adjectives, which describe merely one important aspect of the human race, instead become the whole. No more thinking about people just as fellow human beings created in the image of God. Race must be first and foremost in everyone’s minds.

Herded into identity groups, we’re more easily divided and manipulated. Regardless of the impressive racial progress that America has achieved since eradicating slavery and Jim Crow, the media are utterly obsessed with race as the only aspect of humanity worth talking about.

But if America’s “systemic racism” is the main driver of the riots that have raged for the last three months, why are mobs beheading or defacing statues of Jesus and Mary and black heroes like Frederick Douglass or Arthur Ashe, burning churches and Bibles, and looting stores in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile?

There’s method to this madness. Racism is an excuse to pour gasoline on a larger cause – that of taking down America as we know it and replacing it with a socialist utopia. The founders of Black Lives Matter, after all, admit to being “trained Marxists.”

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s (which is still with us), activists began forcing journalists and medical professionals to use the term “living with HIV,” as a way to de-stigmatize the disease. You could get kicked out of a medical conference for talking about “AIDS infections” or the “AIDS disease.” They’d not hesitate to beat the drums for “living with covid” if they thought it would advance their cause.

Language is a formidable instrument for human progress when used properly.  But, all too often it can be abused, destroying souls, families, or even entire societies.

The most profound and positive use of language in history was when Jesus offered Himself to everyone on Earth, saying, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” and when the Gospel writer John referred to Him as simply The Word.

Amid the current chaos, we need to work hard to preserve America. And, we need to pray that the Marxist-inspired madness and abuse of language will crack up, a victim of its own hostility to truth.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com. You can follow Robert Knight on Twitter @RobertKnight17 and his website is roberthknight.com.

Some readers may be blissfully unaware of DOJ Pride, the “Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Employees of the U.S. Department of Justice and Their Allies.” According to its website, “DOJ Pride is the recognized organization for all Lesbian, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgend employees and allies in all DOJ Offices, Boards, and Divisions; the ATF, BOP, DEA, FBI, USMS, OJP, and USAO; and contractors in any of these components.”

In celebration of “pride” month, DOJ Pride is hosting its annual event on June 28, 2017 in the “in the Great Hall of the department’s main building on Pennsylvania Avenue, in between the Capitol and the White House.”

At this event, DOJ Pride will award its Gerald B. Roemer Community Service Award to “Gavin” Grimm, the girl who masquerades as a boy and who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against her Virginia high school for prohibiting her from using the boys’ restrooms.

Her case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court and would have been heard this month had Attorney General Jeff Sessions not rescinded Obama’s edict to public schools, which threatened loss of federal funds to schools that prohibited co-ed restrooms and locker rooms.

Unfortunately, Sessions really mucked things up a couple of days ago. When asked about the upcoming DOJ Pride event, Sessions said this:

We are going to have a pride group, in this very room… so that’s perfectly appropriate, and we will protect and defend and celebrate that — and protect the rights of all transgender persons…. [W]e are not going to allow persons in this country to be discriminated against or attacked in any way for their sexual orientation—”

What the heck does that mean? Is he saying it’s “perfectly appropriate” for the government to celebrate homoeroticism? Or it’s perfectly appropriate for the government to celebrate the “trans” cult ideology? Or it’s perfectly appropriate for the government to protect and celebrate the non-existent right of pretend-boys and pretend-girls to force their way into opposite-sex restrooms? Is he suggesting that subjective homoerotic feelings and volitional homoerotic activity (i.e., “sexual orientation”) should constitute the basis for a protected class? Is he suggesting that, for example, those who refuse to provide goods or services for celebrations of faux-marriages are guilty of unjust discrimination or attacking homosexuals?

No one should be mistreated or attacked. Neither Gavin Grimm, nor any other person who rejects her or his sex, nor any person who identifies as homosexual should be mistreated. But opposition to bullying or other forms of abuse does not require humans to relinquish their privacy. And opposition to bullying or other forms of abuse certainly does not require the government to celebrate homoeroticism or gender-rejection.

Homosexuals and people who reject their sex are no more or less deserving of celebration than any other person, but the reasons to celebrate them do not include their homoerotic desires, their sex-rejection, or their efforts to sexually integrate restrooms, locker rooms, showers, and shelters.

Session’s statement is the kind of ambiguous statement born of foolishness, cowardice, and political correctness run amok that sows confusion and helps advance the social, political, and moral agenda of Leftists. Many conservative Americans expect more of Sessions.

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