The Law Has Changed and I Have a Right to Be Here

By: American Decency Staff

The Law Has Changed and I Have a Right to Be Here

A Midland Planet Fitness made the news last year when a female customer was shocked to find a man – who claimed to be transgender – changing in the woman's locker room. When she reported it to the front desk, she was told that he was allowed to be there – and essentially that she would have to deal with it.

Apparently accepting this policy, the woman, Yvette Cormier, went on to warn other members about the man in the woman's changing room over the course of her next few visits to the gym, Planet Fitness told her to stop, she refused, and her membership was canceled.

Yvette Cormier is currently suing Planet Fitness for having been "wrongfully denied the benefits of her contract with Planet Fitness and wrongfully denied the use of the public accommodations at Defendant’s gym because she objected to Defendant’s unknown policy.”

That wasn't the only transgender in the bathroom story to make headlines last year.

You may remember the students of Hillsboro High School in Missouri, 150 of which staged a walk out to protest "Lila Perry's" – a biological male identifying as a female – use of the girl's locker room.

Another public high school – this time in Palatine, Illinois – was warned by the Education Department that they had violated the rights of a transgender student, again over the use of a locker room. The school was given 30 days to find a solution or risk losing Title IX funding.

From the New York Times, "In a letter sent Monday, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education told the Palatine district that requiring a transgender student to use private changing and showering facilities was a violation of that student’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that bans sex discrimination. The student, who identifies as female but was born male, should be given unfettered access to girls’ facilities, the letter said."

Then again in Missouri, Springfield this time, the City Council passed a "nondiscrimination" ordinance, which would allow transgenders to use whichever bathroom they desired among other changes.

The ordinance was then placed on the ballot and quickly removed by Springfield voters.

I only mention that occurrence because of one argument I ran across which defends the original ordinance.

 "Steph Perkins couldn’t help but feel under assault.

Years trying to persuade the Springfield City Council to outlaw discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens finally paid off in late 2014 when a nondiscrimination ordinance became law.

Perkins and his fellow supporters didn’t have long to celebrate. Evangelical groups worked quickly on a petition that placed a repeal of the ordinance on the ballot.

The opposition wasn’t much of a surprise. But the strategy — ultimately successful at overturning the discrimination protections — caught Perkins off guard.

Opponents of the nondiscrimination ordinance argued that by including transgender Missourians, the law would protect cross-dressing sexual predators who wished to lurk in women’s restrooms.

'This ordinance … allows them free access next to our women and children,' opponents proclaimed on their website, in public meetings and in advertising.

'It’s just scary to realize that people really believe this,' said Perkins, a transgender man and interim director of the LGBT-rights group PROMO. 'When I go into a restroom I’m doing the same thing everyone else is going in to do. To even suggest otherwise is really scary to me.'"

Although Springfield was able to remove their "nondiscrimination" ordinance, Washington's still stands, and let's be honest, it's Washington, it will probably be on the books for a while.

They have been quickly confronted with that one common sense flaw in the policy, however, which Ms. Perkins alluded to above.

According to a local NBC affiliate,

"Seattle Parks and Recreation is facing a first-of-a-kind challenge to gender bathroom rules. A man undressed in a women's locker room, citing a new state rule that allows people to choose a bathroom based on gender identity.

It was a busy time at Evans Pool around 5:30pm Monday February 8. The pool was open for lap swim. According to Seattle Parks and Recreation, a man wearing board shorts entered the women's locker room and took off his shirt. Women alerted staff, who told the man to leave, but he said'"the law has changed and I have a right to be here…'

As far as policy to protect everyone, Seattle Parks spokesman David Takami says they're still working on the issue. Right now, there's no specific protocol for how someone should demonstrate their gender in order to access a bathroom.  Employees just rely on verbal identification or physical appearance, and this man offered neither.

'This didn’t seem like a transgender issue to staff – someone who was “identifying” as a woman,' Takami wrote in a statement to KING 5. 'We have guidelines that allow transgender individuals to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. We want everyone to feel comfortable in our facilities.'"

Whatever his motivation may be, it seems as if someone is calling the bluff of this new societal norm.

If the line between genders is arbitrary, how will we define it? And if we can define our sexuality however we want, who is to deny this man's identification as a female in the locker room even he wants to act like a man everywhere else? If the answer can't be as basic as the plumbing God puts on us, what human being has the authority to pick and choose whose "identities" are legitimate?

Dr. Albert Mohler commented on the confusion on what to call homosexual "spouses" in a recent episode of the briefing, "The most basic issue in all of this is the fact that a moral revolution like this that turns the very structures of creation that God gave us on their head, turning the world upside down, creates absolute moral chaos. It’s even a chaos that shows up eventually in etiquette and in language and in greeting cards and, for that matter, picture books for children. It’s a world in which the words husband and wife and mother and father and boy and girl and brother and sister have become largely meaningless and always controversial. Even those who are determined to give themselves over to this moral revolution even to lead it aren’t sure even the vocabulary that should be used."

These news stories are fresh evidence that without the standard of God's word, there is only moral chaos.

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