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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Schools need to be educated in transgender rights

Transgender students have started speaking up at schools across the country, but as reported by the New York Times, a line seems to be drawn at the bathroom and locker room.

Before people get all heated, I think we need to take a big step back and look at the situation more objectively.

Even though transgender people are gaining more political and social ground, the idea that biological sex is separate from gender is a concept that many find hard to grasp, for a few simple reasons.

The first—there’s just not a lot of trans education out there right now. And yes, before you point out Caitlyn Jenner or the fact that everyone has access to Google, it really takes people a while to grasp that biological sex and gender often do not correlate. 

That concept needs more in-depth explaining than a simple Google search can yield. I didn’t fully understand trans bodies until I was a sophomore in college taking a gender studies course, where the professor first had to tell me what a social construct was and then how to break it down.

The second reason: there’s still a lot of stigma around genitalia. Now, I recognize that people need to feel physically and sexually safe, which is why whipping your clothes off and running down the street is a crime and why it’s polite to turn around in a locker room. You might think your junk is great, but that doesn’t mean the person next to you feels comfortable seeing it.

But we have stigmas around genitalia that are formed by our understanding of how sex and gender work, which is why the parents of kids push so heavily against allowing transgender people into their proper bathrooms.

We don’t seem to understand that if we removed certain cultural thoughts and ideas around sex and the body from our heads, we could very easily allow transgender people into the right bathroom.

And it wouldn’t just be transgender men and women that benefit. It would help us redefine our performances of gender and allow spaces to open up that aren’t automatically heteronormative.

But we can’t just place the responsibility for pro-activity and education on the trans community.

We need to go back and look at the basic root of the problem—a misunderstanding of what the issue is and a lack of serious education about it.

And we ourselves need to take some action and try to educate ourselves if we are confused. We are at IU, this information is not hard to find.

Until that happens, I can’t blame school systems for being confused. But I do hope that this limbo state won’t last for long, because there are a lot of kids out there who need the help we are still learning to provide.

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