SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Isaac Barnett took a bold step last
year: He told teachers and classmates at his Kansas high school that the
student they had known as a girl now wanted to be accepted as a boy.
His close childhood friend, who also identified as transgender, was ready to reveal his secret, too.
With
the administration’s blessing, a segment featuring the two friends
talking about their transitions aired in the school’s classrooms,
alongside a basketball team promotion and a feature on the importance of
the arts.
"I didn’t get any questions or hate or put-downs or
anything like that," said Barnett, now 18, adding that they called him
Isaac immediately — a drama-free coming-out that would have been
extraordinary in schools a decade ago.
With children rejecting the
birth gender at younger ages and the transgender rights movement
gaining momentum, schools in districts large and small, conservative and
liberal, are working to help transitioning youth fit in without a fuss.
California
this year became the first state with a law spelling out the
transgender student rights in public schools, including the ability to
use restrooms and to play on sports teams that match their expressed
genders.
Another 13 states prohibit discrimination on the basis of
gender identity in schools. Dozens of districts, from Salt Lake City
and Kansas City to Knoxville, Tennessee, and Decatur, Georgia, have
adopted similar protections.
Parents are increasingly seeking a
comfortable learning environment for their transgender children,
according to Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund Executive
Director Michael Silverman.
His group represented the parents of a
transgender Colorado grade school girl who was prevented from using the
girl’s restroom until state civil rights officials ruled in her favor
last year.
There’s "a new generation of parents who grew up in the
age of the gay rights movement and are saying, ‘We want to do what is
best for our children,’" he said.
The trend is likely to accelerate with help from the federal government.
Last
month, the U.S. Education Department alerted districts in a memo on
sexual violence that it would welcome civil rights complaints from
transgender students under Title IX, the 1972 law that bans gender
discrimination at schools.
The guidance gives families new
leverage to negotiate access to locker rooms, sports teams and other
kinds of accommodations covered under California’s law, said Mark Blom, a
National School Boards Association attorney.
He said the memo
surprised him because courts have said Title IX doesn’t provide
protections for sexual orientation or gender identity.
"It’s going
to create a real problem for school districts because the department
has the right to go in and attempt to require the district under threat
of losing federal funding to meet the standard the department
articulates," Blom said.
School officials in states without
anti-discrimination provisions for transgender residents already have
been grappling with how to serve students whose needs conflict with
traditional views about when and why boys and girls are separated.
The
ACLU of Mississippi got involved last year when a high school senior
who was born male but identified as a girl wanted to dress accordingly.
The principal balked, saying the dress code required clothing to conform
to gender.
The school board relented and stood by its decision,
even after some parents and students complained, said Bear Atwood, then
the state ACLU’s executive director.
"For a long time they would
have told you we don’t have any trans kids here," Atwood said. "But as
more and more kids are coming out everywhere else in the country, that
is true in Mississippi as well.
"There is this sense of, ‘We have to start figuring out how to deal with this,’" Atwood said.

Last
week, a Christian legal group, Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the
Louisville, Kentucky, school board to overrule a high school principal
who allowed a transgender freshman to start using the girl’s bathrooms.
The
principal has since limited the student to one girl’s restroom but said
treating her like other female students adhered to the recent Title IX
guidance.
"When the issue of gender identity was brought to my
attention, I had to educate myself on the issue and what this means in
terms of fair and just treatment of transgender people," Atherton High
School Principal Thomas Aberli said.
Alliance Defending Freedom
attorney Jeremy Tedesco said schools should instead give transgender
students the option of using staff or unisex facilities, as many do.
"The fact that we are in a position culturally where schools are just caving to these demands is
very concerning," he said.
Kim
Pearson, training director of Trans Youth Family Allies, estimates that
for every case that makes headlines there are dozens that are resolved
quietly and easily.
Since she co-founded the support and advocacy
group in 2007, Pearson has worked with parents and educators in half of
the states. "If a school wants to get it, they will," Pearson said.
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