On Friday, May 13, the Departments of Education and Justice sent out a letter to all schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
The guidance, which according to President Barack Obama aims to protect the “dignity and safety of vulnerable children”, was issued in response to North Carolina’s recent, and very controversial, transgender bill.
Signed into law in March, North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (HB2), requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender of birth in government buildings. The federal government had previously warned the state of the law’s civil rights violation until they decided to sue. And North Carolina sued back.
But it’s not only the courtroom double trouble the state will have to worry about. Georgia State’s assistant professor, Kristie Seelman conducted a study within the transgender population of Georgia State which showed that transgender students have higher rates of attempted suicide when denied access to bathrooms of their self-identified gender.
The study was based on a previous national survey, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), with over 6,000 participants, one fifth of which had also been denied access to their gender’s bathrooms in the past.
Seelman said that while suicide attempts and denied bathroom access are statistically related, there could be other factors weighing in, leading to a suicide attempt. Such things include how included transgender individuals feel on campus and their overall experience.
“That is a limitation of the study,” Seelman said. “However, the relationship [of the two factors] fits in the knowledge base of what we know from interviews with trans people – not having access to bathrooms makes life more difficult and heighten stress.”
60.5% of the Georgia State participants reported having been denied access to bathrooms, and 46.5% had attempted suicide in the past, a number which Seelman called “alarmingly high”.
“Many transgender people experience a great deal of anxiety about just finding a place where they can go to the bathroom safely – with some avoiding public bathrooms completely,” she said.
Chattahoochee high school student Heath Goldmon, said there have been many issues in his high school about the bathroom he uses. After a student report about Goldmon’s presence in the boys’ bathroom, administrators asked him to use the female bathrooms to avoid more reports, and gave him another alternative.
“They suggested I used the handicap bathroom, to which I took some offense, seeing as I don’t consider my identity as a handicap,” he said.
In a Feb. 2015 Facebook post, Goldmon described the situation and wrote, “my gender identification in no way causes a mental, physical, or emotional malfunction to my body”.
