An attorney filed a Title IX complaint last week on behalf of a 15-year-old female high school student who says her rights were violated when the school allowed a biological male to dress and undress in the girls’ locker room.
The girl is a student at Honesdale High School in Pennsylvania, within the Wayne Highlands School District.
“By permitting a male to enter girls’ locker rooms, restrooms, and other privacy areas, the Wayne Highlands School District deprived all female students of the constitutionally protected right of bodily privacy, created a harassing and hostile environment for girls, and discriminated against girls,” reads the complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education.
Further, it says, by “forcing girls to undress in front of a male student,” the school district “created an environment where sexual harassment occurred and continues to occur daily.”
The district policy of allowing biological boys to dress in a locker room for girls is “in violation of the Wayne Highlands School District’s obligations under Title IX,” the complaint says. The policy permits transgender teens to use locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond with their preferred gender.
Attorney Andrea L. Shaw says in the complaint that the teen girl was “changing in the girls’ locker room before her gym class” on Sept. 17, 2018, when she “heard a male’s voice.” She turned around to see a male who was “only wearing girls’ underwear and a t-shirt.”
“She and other girls in the locker room were in states of partial undress at that time,” the complaint says.
The situation made her “feel extremely embarrassed” and “violated,” the complaint says.
“That a male student looked at her while she was partially undressed was embarrassing and intolerable in the girls’ locker room,” it says.
The male student is attracted to females and “has been seen at school events holding hands with girls.”
Her parents complained to the principal but were told that the boy had a right to use the girls’ locker room, although the principal did ask the boy to dress behind a shower curtain.
“This hardly remedied the girls’ right to privacy because the… male student can still view all of the girls while they are in various stages of undress,” the complaint says.
Michael Foust is a freelance writer. Visit his blog, MichaelFoust.com.
Photo courtsey: Unsplash
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