Transgender 1st Grader Can Use Girls’ Bathroom

A Colorado 6-year-old with a penis has successfully sued for the right to use the girls' restroom.

coy-matthis

A Colorado 6-year-old with a penis has successfully sued for the right to use the girls’ restroom.

CNN (“Transgender first-grader wins the right to use girls’ restroom“):

A transgender first-grader who was born a boy but identifies as a girl has won the right to use the girls’ restroom at her Colorado school.

The Colorado Rights Division ruled in favor of Coy Mathis in her fight against the Fountain-Fort Carson School District.

Coy’s parents had taken her case to the commission after the district said she could no longer use the girls’ bathroom at Eagleside Elementary.

In issuing its decision, the state’s rights division said keeping the ban in place “creates an environment that is objectively and subjectively hostile, intimidating or offensive.”

Coy’s mother, Kathryn Mathis, said she’s thrilled that Coy can return to school and put this behind her.

The first-grader has been home-schooled during the proceedings

“Schools should not discriminate against their students,” Mathis said. “All we ever wanted was for Coy’s school to treat her the same as other little girls. We are extremely happy that she now will be treated equally.”

[…]

For most of the past year, Coy has dressed as a girl.

Coy’s passport and state-issued identification recognize her as female.

[…]

Mathis said she got a call “out of the blue” from the school in December saying that Coy could use the boys’ bathroom, gender-neutral faculty bathrooms or the nurse’s bathroom, but not the girls’ facilities.

The district “took into account not only Coy, but other students in the building, their parents and the future impact a boy with male genitals using a girls’ bathroom would have as Coy grew older,” a letter the family’s attorney received in December said.

“However, I’m certain you can appreciate that, as Coy grows older and his male genitals develop along with the rest of his body, at least some parents and students are likely to become uncomfortable with his continued use of the girls’ restroom.”

There’s no easy or obvious solution here.

While the “inequality” argument strikes me as silly—this is not a situation of equals—it nonetheless seems inhumane to add to this little kid’s pain. Being psychologically female in a male body is difficult enough without having the authorities impose your physical identity on you for another dozen years.

On the other hand, the district absolutely has a point here: However much Coy may self-identify as female, Coy has a penis. That makes the bathroom issue complicated for the other students and their parents. While mitigated somewhat by the fact that girls’ restrooms have more privacy than boys’ restrooms, a whole lot of girls will be uncomfortable by having to share a restroom with someone with a penis, especially down the road.

Restrooms at least come equipped with stalls. Does the court’s logic extend to showers?

The issue is further complicated by the fact that Coy is only 6—an age where children are allowed to make virtually no decisions for themselves. A 6-year-old can’t buy a pack of cigarettes or travel alone on an airplane but they’re apparently able to decide what sex they want to be? I’m rather amazed that the US government has recognized Coy as a female by issuing a passport in that sex. On what basis? Surely, the birth certificate lists him as a boy. Most states will only amend sex on a birth certificate with proof of either error (i.e., the child has a penis and was incorrectly listed as a female) or after reconstructive surgery. The ACLU explains that,

A copy of the court order confirming the name change is required to change the name on one’s passport. A detailed statement from one’s surgeon or hospital that one has had sex reassignment surgery, or plans to, is needed to get the gender marker changed.  To change the gender marker, the State Department often
simply “stamps over” the previous gender marker on the passport.

Only a handful of states and the District of Columbia prohibit transgender discrimination.

California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia all have such laws. Their protections vary. Minnesota’s law bans discrimination in employment, housing, education and public accommodations; Hawaii’s covers only housing.

At least 93 cities and counties have passed their own laws prohibiting gender identity discrimination including Phoenix, Atlanta, Louisville, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Dallas and Buffalo.

Federal law is inconsistent on this issue, although moving in the direction of accommodating transgendered individuals. But there’s no definitive rule either in federal law or judicial interpretation even on the relatively obvious restroom accomodation issue. The only ruling I could find referenced was a 2002 ruling by the 8th Circuit in a case called Cruzan vs. Davis that individuals made uncomfortable by the presence of transgendered individuals in the restroom should be accomodated by being offered a separate facility, rather than the more obvious solution of offering the private restroom to the one individual creating the issue.

 

FILED UNDER: Environment, Gender Issues, Law and the Courts, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Caj says:

    The child is six so what’s the big deal? All toilets are behind closed doors in a woman’s restroom anyway. Far different from a woman wanting to use a man’s bathroom where urinals are in full view.

  2. DC Loser says:

    Once upon a time in a nightclud in Belgium, I had to use an urinal located in the hallway in front of the ladies room entrance. If in Rome……

  3. Electroman says:

    I’m not sure how she got state ID and a passport that identifys her as female either, but I would think that’s the end of the matter, legally. Am I wrong?

  4. Will says:

    Gender isn’t that difficult to determine. We know from 6th grade health class that girls have two “x” chromesomes while boys have a “y” and an “x”. We have lab test that could easily put the issue to rest.
    What astounds me is the parents who are apparently encouraging their male son to dress and act like a female.

    Don’t go and misinterpret what I am saying, I fully understand that there are people who are “transgendered” and I don’t pretend to know or understand the root cause or causes of such. What I don’t get is parents encouraging a 6-year-old (and probably did so at an earlier age) to dress and act like a girl, to go and have legal documents identify the child as a girl, etcetera, when the child may just be an impressionable CHILD.

    I’m not saying to ignore the child’s tendancies but don’t go all out insisting that he is a she. Work with a child psychologist and help the child to discover who he/she is.

  5. The only thing that actually disturbs me about this girl is the purple hair.

  6. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Will:

    Work with a child psychologist and help the child to discover who he/she is.

    Maybe they already have/are? In fact, I would put money on it. Kids are cruel.

  7. @Will:

    We know from 6th grade health class that girls have two “x” chromesomes while boys have a “y” and an “x”.

    Except it’s not that simple. There’s other combinations like XXY, XYY, or XXX that occur in the human population. There are also hormonal problems where the subject has the phenotype of one gender but the karyotype of the another (e.g if they have XY, but they have faulty androgen receptor genes so that nothing on the Y chromosome actually works, they will develop an entirely female body).

  8. Franklin says:

    @Stormy Dragon:

    Except it’s not that simple.

    Precisely. My understanding is that I don’t understand it. Just look at the difficulty that Olympic officials have in coming up with a gender test.

  9. john425 says:

    A six year old boy has “decided” he is a girl? Gimme a break. Sick parents warped this kid.

  10. Gromitt Gunn says:

    @Will: Here’s a crazy idea… many of the topics you learned about in middle school were oversimplified because, well, you were in middle school. Unless you happened to go to the one middle school in the US that taught multi-variate calculus, advanced genetics, and deconstructionism to the entire student body.

  11. James Joyner says:

    @Franklin:

    My understanding is that I don’t understand it. Just look at the difficulty that Olympic officials have in coming up with a gender test.

    That’s pretty much where I come down as well.

    @john425:

    A six year old boy has “decided” he is a girl? Gimme a break. Sick parents warped this kid.

    I’ve only known one person who I knew was transgendered. He finally decided in his mid-30s, after achieving considerable success as a sportswriter, to start presenting as a woman. He (almost the entire time I knew Chris, he presented as male; I moved on from the company shortly after he began the transition, so I still think of Chris as a he) said that he knew from the time he was very little that he was really a girl. Given how unimaginable changing my gender identity is to me, I took it as a given that that was the case. That is, our gender is so fundamental to who we are that this isn’t some choice. It’s a body-brain mismatch.

  12. ptfe says:

    Not to get pedantic — ok, I’ll get pedantic:

    Sex: Emphasis is on biological/physiological markers.

    Gender: Emphasis is on social and cultural identification. The girl in question is “female gendered”, not female-sexed.

    So Will, figuring out gender is much easier than you think: ask the person. And Franklin, figuring out sex is the problem for Olympic officials — they’re concerned about female-gendered/male-sexed people competing in women’s sports.

  13. Rafer Janders says:

    A 6-year-old can’t buy a pack of cigarettes or travel alone on an airplane but they’re apparently able to decide what sex they want to be?

    Um, yes. Yes, they can decide.

    If, when you were a little six year old boy, your parents had suddenly decided that you were going to become a girl, and that from now on you were going to have a girl’s name and dress and live as a girl, do you think there might have been some issue with that? Do you think your parents should have had the right to choose your gender for you?

  14. Rafer Janders says:

    @DC Loser:

    Once upon a time in a nightclud in Belgium, I had to use an urinal located in the hallway in front of the ladies room entrance. If in Rome……

    I thought you said you were in Belgium….?

  15. Jay L. Gischer says:

    My own daughter is transgendered, male-to-female. She told us when she was 20. But she knew for a long time before that. One of the well-established characteristics of transgendered people is that they don’t ever change their mind about who they are inside. They might hide themselves, but they don’t change their mind.

    Because of my daughter, I have met many other people who are transgendered, and talked with some of their parents. The idea that these parents “warped” their children does not fit the facts of their stories.

    One story, from a mother, talked about how much resistance the father of a 7-year-old, identified at birth as a male, had to allowing the child to begin presenting as female. Finally, he agreed to try it out on a family vacation. After just a couple of days, the child was so transformed, so happy, that the father was completely on board, asking, “How can we get this to happen at her school?”

    At first, I was fearful for my own child, and doubted my own ability to support her. I don’t any more. I find in the journey of transgender people something very human and inspiring. We all face the problem of how to show the world what we feel inside, and those changing gender face an extreme version of it, which they typically meet and overcome with style and grace.

  16. Jay L. Gischer says:

    As to James’ questions, I think the shower is a whole different level of issue than the bathroom in an elementary school, and one which can be addressed in a variety of ways. I’ve heard some creative solutions to it.

    A lawsuit is exactly the place where this sort of issue doesn’t belong, though.

  17. ptfe says:

    As far as Will:

    I’m not saying to ignore the child’s tendancies but don’t go all out insisting that he is a she. Work with a child psychologist and help the child to discover who he/she is.

    Why does a kid need a child psychologist to “discover who he/she is”? Did you have a child psychologist sit you down and tell you that you were a boy? Or work with you to figure out whether you were possibly trans-gendered? Or did you just know — know — that you were one gender or the other?

    Kids are often told by parents which side of the gender divide they should be on, thus cementing the fate of a not-insignificant number of children who would otherwise self-identify as the opposite gender except that they’ve been told — told — that they’re a boy because of the boy bits and boys act a certain way so they better get all the way on the boy train from the age of 3 or they’re somehow defective.

    Most parents are closed to this prospect because they come into parenthood with preconceived notions that the sex of their child must be the gender of their child and that any conflict there is inherently unnatural (which your comment indicates, even if you don’t think it does). Turns out male and female is a pretty big sliding scale, both in gender and sex, and defining your child for them isn’t helpful at all.

    Only slightly related: my oldest daughter (4 — she so far identifies as a girl) has been great at showing us just how much social gendering we do. Turns out we assume maleness everywhere. Ancillary characters in almost every book are assumed to be boys; dogs, baby elephants, tigers, baddies, stuffed animals, hell even ants — they’re all called boys, except when they’ve got a dress and long hair and something pink, in which case they must be girls (and are villainous witches, show that omnipresent female weakness/incompetence in the face of danger, and/or disappear into the background). We socially use names to identify “boy” vs “girl”. At her age, all these identifiers don’t work. Her default position is that everything is a girl until proven a boy, and in stories where she particularly likes the ostensibly male protagonist(s), she sometimes asks us to change gender markers to female because she wants to identify with them.

  18. Gromitt Gunn says:

    @john425: Highly doubtful. Sick parents are much more likely to try to beat (literally – far too often) the feminine aspects of their little boys out of them.

  19. Franklin says:

    @ptfe: Actually I don’t feel like you’re being pedantic. I don’t think the distinction you are making is universal or even well-known. So it’s good to educate, and I’ll try to remember it. I’ve long lost touch with the one transgendered individual I knew, who felt he was probably a woman but did not yet present as such.

  20. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @john425:

    A six year old boy has “decided” he is a girl? Gimme a break. Sick parents warped this kid.

    If ignorance and bliss are proportionate, my enviousness of your state of bliss is equaled only to the fear I feel for those who have your ignorance inflicted upon them.

  21. James in Silverdale, WA says:

    I encountered a veritable sea of transgender folks in the early 1990s at Michigan State University where they had a student support group that had mushroomed from simply a few gay guys to pretty much anyone who wanted to discuss social issues of all kinds as it related to their personal lives.

    What I learned from that was gender, sex, sexual orientation… like all the rest of human traits fall on a spectrum, and are not absolute. When we insist on absolutism then real damage is done.

    I also learned that my capacity to love is far larger than I ever could have imagined.

    To the person who wrote: “A 6-year-old can’t buy a pack of cigarettes or travel alone on an airplane but they’re apparently able to decide what sex they want to be?”

    The answer is “yes.” What other answer is there? Your parents? How do they accomplish that? I knew what I was when I was four. How old were you?

    With sexual orientation and gender issues coming more into the light, I think we’ll a greater tendency toward experimentation now that stigmas are falling, further blurring the traditional (and clearly inadequate) lines.

  22. Anderson says:

    What astounds me is the parents who are apparently encouraging their male son to dress and act like a female.

    Cite please.

  23. JKB says:

    Well, this is the logical consequence of open acceptance of non-heterosexual orientations. Why do we separate males and females in situations where they may be unclothed? Because of sexual attraction. There is a reason that toddlers are not gender separated for many private functions but once they reach an age of sexual awareness, it’s different. But now, we accept same sex sexual attraction. So there is no logical rationale to provide separate facilities for males and females to conduct their bodily functions or washing. If separate facilities are required, they’d have to be provided on the bases of sexual attraction and bisexuals would have to be given a single person facility.

    So wake up and accept the reality. Don’t be so 20th century.

  24. Franklin says:

    @JKB:

    Why do we separate males and females in situations where they may be unclothed? Because of sexual attraction.

    I don’t think this is necessarily true. Ideally we’d have separate stalls for every unclothed person on the basis of privacy; it’s just unfeasible because that would take a hell of a lot more space. (Personally I would have preferred such an arrangement since I went through puberty a couple years after most of my peers.)

  25. the Q says:

    Sorry, I have to agree the parents have an agenda. She’s 6 for god’s sake. Whats next? Nursery school bathrooms for transgendered 4 year olds? (I am sure thats next). And then the lawsuit against hospitals labeling a newborn infant baby with a penis as a “boy” when it just may be too soon to tell? And suing the hospital for emotional distress since the birth certificate says “boy” and they may really be emotionally a girl?

    Wingnuts who use this as fodder for their culture wars are just as inane as those who think that this 6 year has got everything figured out and has hired an attorney to press for her rights.

    Everyone piling on john425 should think back when they were 6. Its like asking a 6 year old who they would vote for to be President. 99% of them would mimic who their parents preference, if they have any notion of what “vote for President” means.

    Come on, sometimes common sense goes out the window when it comes to these issues.

  26. bill says:

    “a child with a penis”, that’s a long word for “boy”.

  27. James in Silverdale, WA says:

    @JKB: “Well, this is the logical consequence of open acceptance of non-heterosexual orientations. ”

    What legislation do you require such that your delicate sensitivities are no longer threatened? What restraints would you impose on “non-hetrosexual orientations?” What would be the test? How would it be enforced?

  28. aFloridian says:

    @the Q: Q is very right about these parents having an agenda. Obviously attacking the credibility of this individual girl doesn’t address the larger issues of transgendered children, but it is still worth exploring, and after hearing about the result of this case (after forgetting about it when I first heard about the suit some months back) I did some pretty extensive research last night into the Mathis family, and while, unfortunately, some things are hearsay, much of it is corroborated by the mother’s own statements and also a comparison of dates and whatnot. This is the gist of it:

    1. Kathryn Mathis – aspiring infant photographer. Mr. Mathis, full-time college student, presumably until 2012. During an interview from a few years back Ms. Mathis explains that she has two autistic children, one with severebrain injuries leading to severe developmental disability, and then Coy Mathis, the transgender little girl (still dressed as a boy at age 3 1/2) who is described as her “neuro-typical” child.

    2. After the initial revelation about Coy in the media when the suit was filed, a former online acquaintance of Ms. Mathis wrote a very interesting, and convincingly cited, blog entry about the family and some of their issues.

    3. Ms. Mathis apparently was once an active user of online social media, gaining a following in online mother’s forums for triplets, disabled children, and so forth. She has stated herself that Coy and his two siblings were conceived with Mexican fertility drugs, followed by a live birth in a swimming pool in the family living room.

    4. There are some serious accusations about Ms. Mathis being responsible for her daughter’s brain injuries due to using an alternative healer. I do not think there are enough facts to make a determination about this, particularly since my brief (I am not in the medical field) research suggests that the condition the children came down with, RSV, has no real treatments anyway other than riding it out.

    5. I first became interested in the question of Coy’s possible developmental disability after watching this Katie Couric interview where the child struck me as possibly being disabled in some way, though of course there’s no way of knowing merely by watching a single interview. I would also note during the interview, however, that Ms. Mathis and her husband hardly make a convincing case, and the interview is incredibly awkward.

    6. So while we must proceed on the assumption that Coy is a normal little boy/girl, it is still relevant to the whole proceeding that her mother is someone who highly values alternative lifestyles and likely thrives on the attention she received from her fans as a mother of developmentally disabled children and triplets, including setting videos of her birth and other events to music and offering playdates with her daughter on twitter for hundreds of dollars as an apparent method of raising money for a wheelchair van.

    My final conclusion: I really do question whether this child is truly a transgendered girl in boy’s body. Obviously the child has been raised in an environment of great stress, with all of her siblings (though I know nothing of the child Ms. Mathis was pregnant with during the interview I posted first) being developmentally disabled. Is this a cry for attention from the child? Does it have anything to do with the child at all, or is the whole thing sexed up for the media to raise the profile of the Mathis family (indeed, it is not verifiable by me, but there are reports of documentary film making already having begun at the Mathis home, presumably for a reality television series, as well as reports that the family has shopped around various book ideas to publishers)?

    Obviously, I have doubts about transgendered children of these ages in the first place. I am not convinced that children of such a young age have solidified their gender identities, nor that it is healthy for the child’s longterm emotional and physical well-being for their parents to encourage this behavior or conception of themselves. Also, though I cannot presently locate my source, I really seem to recall Ms. Mathis saying, when the issue first hit the media, that she knew that Coy was transgendered at 18 months (and that this was due to his preference for his sister’s pink blankets). Even those of you who think I am a bigoted fool for even daring to question the reality of transgendered children – do you truly believe a child, even at that age, can be cognizant of his/her transgendered identity? Either way, there are interesting legal, moral, and cultural issues coming down the road. There was recently a case in Australia that dealt with some similar issues – what do you when a transgender girl begins to hit male puberty?

  29. William Wilgus says:

    If I declare myself to be transgender, can I watch the girls go potty too? Life used to be so much simpler: ‘His’ and ‘Hers’. Now we apparently need ‘Other’ or ‘Both’ as well. I don’t envy those who have sexual identity problems.

  30. bill says:

    @the Q: “she” is a “boy”, the penis don’t lie. the parents are wack jobs for dragging (no pun intended) HIM though this at HIS age. “unfit” is a good word for what they are.

  31. bill says:

    @William Wilgus: i always said i was a lesbian trapped in a mans body….

  32. JKB says:

    @James in Silverdale, WA: your delicate sensitivities are no longer threatened?

    My sensitivities are not threatened. But we have done away with the societal lie, i.e., that by separating males and females we avoid unclothed individuals being exposed to those sexually attracted to them. Now that same sex sexual attraction is out of the closet officially so to speak, we need to revisit the social conventions that were built upon the lie. Separate facilities based on arbitrary possession of sex organs is one of those conventions.

  33. Minnesota says:

    Let’s just be honest…I guess we would have to label the bathrooms for “IT”….anyone ever hear of …”both male and female, created He them…” So apparently God makes mistakes when he creates people…puts the wrong parts on the wrong people? Really? What a very SMALL view of God. I’m so glad we know so much as humans and can explain EVERYTHING …aren’t we smart! By the way…who hung the earth in space and keeps it spinning??? hmmmmm…pretty sure it wasn’t a boy…no maybe a girl….wait…she/he wasn’t sure…must’ve been an “IT”!!!

  34. Minnesota says:

    @bill: I’m sure the same people who think this is all ok, will think that if a duck wants to be a goose IT CAN! If a horse wants to be a cow IT CAN!!! I’m so glad the animal world has MORE sense than we humans…we think we’re so highly educated and yet we can’t even figure out which bathroom to use, or how to use the parts we were born with. What a tragedy!

  35. Tyrell says:

    @JKB: There will be some perverted individuals who.will take advantage of these court decisions by dressing as women and using women’s locker rooms and shower just to get their thrills and probably get it all on video. How many parents will be comfortable with a fourteen year old male using the girls’ restrooms and dressing rooms? That is when there will be a huge outcry from parents. And then someone will take the school system to court demanding that some sort of special facilities be constructed, costing the taxpayers tons of more money. No wonder home and charter schools are growing. This sort of issue needs a lot more study before the courts change society’s norms and conventions because of of a few people. As this young child gets older, there will be more disruption. In middle and high school this will cause a lot of problems. Today a few expect the rest of society to change just to meet their own personal preferences and tastes. In this situation the parents should have gotten medical and psychological treatment for their child early on and not let it get this bad.

  36. James in Silverdale, WA says:

    @JKB: “Separate facilities based on arbitrary possession of sex organs is one of those conventions.”

    How about get control of yourself as an adult so the room in which you urinate and defecate is simply that, and not this imagined sex-crazed potential orgy house you seem to imagine exists, but does not? Have you heard of unisex bathrooms?

    If you begin with live and let live, bathrooms are rather a no-brainer. Seriously.

  37. Franklin says:

    @Minnesota:

    So apparently God makes mistakes when he creates people…puts the wrong parts on the wrong people? Really? What a very SMALL view of God.

    So apparently your god isn’t responsible for birth defects?

  38. Tyrell says:

    @aFloridian: What all of this means is that the idiosyncrasies and odd tastes of the parents combined with experimentation and manipulation combined to warp this child’s personality completely.

  39. Tyrell says:

    @James in Silverdale, WA: I was in a restroom a few years ago that was in a large store, three other guys and myself. In walks this lady with a very young boy, right past where we were using the urinals. No problem, didn’t bother us. Usually in that situation the mother will take a toddler boy into the ladies room.
    Where the problem will start is that a lot of parents will not want their teen age daughters in a restroom in this type of situation. Most adults would not be bothered. As I have said, showers and
    dressing rooms would be a problem. Schools are under no mandate to modify or provide separate facilities such as showers (almost all showers in schools are open) unless it involves someone classified with a disability.

  40. James Joyner says:

    @Tyrell: I’m pretty sure adult women are not permitted in men’s restrooms and vice versa. As a single father, I take my young daughters to public restrooms all the time. The accompany me to the men’s room.

  41. Liberty and Independence says:

    @Franklin:

    This isn’t a birth defect. If a child is born with Spina Bifida, Down’s Syndrome, Klinfelter’s Syndrome, or any other “Physical Defect”, their DNA still clearly identifies their gender. It’s interesting because, Medical and Health Organizations refer to those suffering with an “XXY” chromosomal abnormality as “Males.” This is a boy, regardless of his psychological issues. How would you feel if this poor child decided he identified with puppies and spent his day barking at his classmates?