High school girls risking infections and dehydration to avoid using same bathrooms as biological males

First Bostock; now the Equality Act. The transgender movement has transformed America, and we’re still finding out what that will entail. I’ve already noted that in many places, girls have begun to refuse using bathrooms if biological males identifying as females are also permitted to use them. Many girls say they are scared or uncomfortable; others have simply been waiting to use the bathroom until school is over rather than risk using the facilities alongside a biological male. According to some concerned parents, girls are risking urinary tract infections rather than use the bathroom.

Over at First Things, Carl R. Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and senior fellow a the Institute for Faith and Freedom, explains “a new pastoral problem” in the Age of Trans:

Last week, a pastor friend told me about a new problem he is facing in his congregation. I hesitate to call it a “first world pastoral problem” because that runs the risk of trivializing it, of making it seem akin to those issues only deemed catastrophic by chattering-class Westerners—a sudden shortage of quinoa at Whole Foods, for example, or a blight on zinfandel grapes. This is a first world problem in the sense that it is created by the chattering classes; but it is in no sense trivial.   

The problem my pastor friend faces is how to counsel parents of teenage girls who will not drink anything before going to school lest they have to use the bathrooms that, thanks to the stroke of President Biden’s pen, are now open to teenage boys who think—or claim—to have been born in the wrong bodies. It seems that anxiety and physical discomfort caused by the new bathroom policy will now be the new normal for young high school girls. Trans activists like to use the language of “safety” as a way of playing to the aesthetics of our therapeutic culture and delegitimizing their critics. Well, these biological women no longer feel safe. Their spaces, like their gender, have been stolen from them by men and for men. They now feel themselves to be in such danger that they cannot even hydrate before school lest they have to use the restroom during the day. America has had a number of presidents whose appetites meant that they arguably posed a danger to many women who crossed their physical paths; but the current president has out-performed them all. His policies have made him a danger to all women everywhere, even in high school restrooms.   

…Because of the Biden administration’s transgender policies, some girls will be subject to voyeurism and assault in the very place where they should be guaranteed privacy and safety. Some female prisoners will be raped by men pretending to be women in a place where the state has confined them. Tragedies will flow from this. Of that there can be no doubt. And I truly hope that the victims do not simply seek justice in the criminal courts against the immediate perpetrators. I hope they will also sue the people who pushed these policies: the ideologues who knew exactly what they were doing; the doctors and insurance companies who implemented and financed this cultural Ponzi scheme; and maybe even the tomfools who, like the liberals of Verkhovensky’s revolutionary strategy in Dostoevsky’s Demons, enabled the whole shambles through their fear of seeming insufficiently liberal to their friends, neighbors, and Twitter followers. 

It is quite clear that the safety and well-being of children and women means nothing to these people. And so only when it starts costing them their money, their reputations, and their sense of security, will we see any major change of direction in the culture as a whole. Only then will teenage girls be able to go back to school without fear of being violated. Or, indeed, of being dehydrated.

And trans activists don’t care. In fact, they respond with the ugliest vitriol when girls express their concerns. Back in 2019, I posted a short video of a teen girl fighting back tears as she explained why she didn’t want biological boys to have access to the female locker rooms—as a swimmer, she frequently had to change. The video got 5.9 million views, and the trans Twitter hordes posted hundreds of comments deriding her, calling her names, and dismissing her concerns as the crocodile tears of an irredeemable bigot. Girl power is out, trans is in—and if you’re a female and trying to navigate high school, keep any concerns about sharing your private spaces with biological males to yourself. If you don’t, the trans crowd will come for you.