The campus crusade for transgender bathrooms

By Bryan Fischer

Boise State University plans to break ground on May 8 on an expansion of the Student Union Building which will include at least one bathroom intended for use by the transgendered community at Boise State. This expansion will be built with public dollars, a combination of mandatory student fees and bonds issued by the university.

Leah Barrett, the Executive Director of the Student Union Building, presented the expansion plans to the student senate this spring, and as recently as this past Monday called the bathroom in question a "transgender bathroom," and acknowledged that one of its intended uses is for people who are confused about their gender.

I am in receipt of an email from BSU's Director of Communications, Frank Zang, in which he says categorically, "Regarding your current issue, Boise State does not have plans for a transgendered bathroom in its expansion of the Student Union Building."

The new restroom will be built to accommodate a disabled individual and an aid, as required by law, and will be designated as a unisex restroom. However, the fact that this restroom for the disabled is required by law provides no explanation for Ms. Barrett's characterization of it as a "transgender" bathroom.

Thus we have two university officials directly contradicting each other regarding the intended purposes and uses of this new restroom. Ms. Barrett has so far failed to respond either to an email sent to her last Monday or to a voice mail left for her last Tuesday morning. A follow-up call to her office yesterday reached a voice message that indicated she will be "out of the office" until the middle of next week.

The issue of transgender bathrooms is, for homosexual activists, a major front in the cultural battle, and official recognition of such a facility at Boise State, a state-sponsored, taxpayer-funded institution, would be a significant triumph for them.

A transgender task force recently launched a campaign at the University of Colorado to bring "all-gendered" bathrooms to its campus. The campaign was headed by a student who describes himself as "gender queer," meaning that he identifies himself as neither male nor female. According to one news report, "He doesn't feel comfortable in the men's bathroom and gets strange looks when he walks into the women's bathroom."

The restroom sign developed for all-gender bathrooms is half of a figure wearing a dress and the other half wearing pants.

According a story in the New York Times, the "new political frontier" in the culture war is "the campaign to establish gender-neutral bathrooms in public places." The idea, the article continues, is to make sure that transsexuals, cross-dressers, and "those with a fluid, androgynous identity who do not consider themselves completely male or female" can use bathrooms "without fear or harassment."

Even the American Psychiatric Association, in the Bible of diagnostic practice, the DSM-IV, identifies transgenderism as a "disorder," repeatedly refers to it as a mental and psychological "disturbance," and quite naturally declares that this "disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning."

The tragic nature of this disorder is illustrated by a 2004 story from the Guardian, a far-left newspaper in England. The story profiles a man who, at the time of the story, had changed his sex for the third time in 11 years. By that time, the surgical mutilations of his body had left him with no sex organs at all. "Once Dainton had a penis, then a vagina, now she has nothing."

In his last sex change operation, he only received breast implants. With no genitals left from prior operations, the only way to create a new vagina would have been to remove a section of his bowel, which would leave him needing a colostomy bag. According to the Guardian, this is surgery he actually would consider "if I had a new partner and we decided it would help our relationship sexually."

One individual who underwent a sex change operation he now regrets has launched a campaign against what he calls the "sex change industry," and argues that transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists. "Their language is illusory," he says. "You fundamentally can't change sex. The surgery doesn't alter you genetically. It's genital mutilation ... I've never been a woman, just Alan."

The transgendered are clearly suffering from some serious psychological complications, and our hearts should go out to them with the offer of all the help we can provide to assist them in making their way out of that dark place and back to an acceptance and affirmation of their God-given sexual identity.

BSU is not helping them by promoting the normalization of gender identity disorders at taxpayer expense. It's time for this tragic silliness to stop, and it needs to stop right here, right now, at Boise State University.

© Bryan Fischer