Lawmakers in Tennessee are debating a bill that would go further than other bills recently considered and passed by other states such as South Dakota.
The bill recently passed by the South Dakota legislature and ultimately vetoed by Governor Dennis Daugaard (R) would have forced K-12 schools to corral transgender students into their own bathrooms separate from boys and girls, but lawmakers in Tennessee are advancing a bill that would apply to all levels of public education, including college, and prohibit any accommodation.
On Tuesday, the Tennessee House Education Administration & Planning Subcommittee held a hearing on HB 2414, which dictates that public schools must require students to use bathrooms and locker rooms according to the sex “indicated on the student’s original birth certificate.” [...]
By tying the bill to individuals’ birth certificates, it guarantees that no transgender person could ever secure access to the bathroom that fits their gender. Tennessee is one of the few states in the union that has absolutely no mechanism for changing the sex marker on a person’s birth certificate.
And who would be in charge of scrutinizing every student's genitalia and birth certificate?
Tennessee law explicitly prohibits the alteration of birth certificates "as a result of sex change surgery," meaning lawmakers are considering a bill to alienate and emotionally torture transgender youths for the first quarter of their lives.
If the bill passed by lawmakers in South Dakota would have violated Title IX, this bill currently lingering in the Tennessee legislature certainly would.
There's no doubt in my mind a Republican president and Congress would amend the law to allow for this kind of discrimination if they had a chance to.
Gender is not a binary that is strictly dictated by genitalia and these visions of "boys in girls’ restrooms" are only found in the heads of paranoid and perverted conservative lawmakers. These sick representatives spend far more time dwelling on these fictional scenarios than anyone else.