"...in a few years it will be the people who want to rigidly tie people to the sex they were born into – and who want to check students’ birth certificates at the bathroom door – who will be the societal outliers"

Transgender Rights: 

Coming to a School Near You?

By Adam Cohen

Grant High School in Portland, Oregon has just done something to put itself in the forefront of one of the major civil rights issues of our time. It created six unisex bathrooms. 

The reason: it wanted to accommodate transgender students who do not feel comfortable in the boys’ and girls’ rooms, including 17-year-old Scott Morrison (who was born male but identifies as female), who said he avoided drinking water in school because using the restroom was so stressful.

As gay rights, including same-sex marriage, become increasingly accepted, the civil rights frontline is shifting to transgender people, and increasingly to transgender students. More transgender young people are asking their schools to accommodate their gender identity – and increasingly they have state or local non-discrimination law on their side.

..............Read more: time.com

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Bathroom Battle: 

States Grapple With Transgender Rights

By Katy Steinmetz

What do you call it when a person enters a bathroom but the sign outside doesn’t match the sex listed on his or her birth certificate? Disorderly conduct, according to a bill offered earlier this month by Arizona state Rep. John Kavanagh. But the measure sparked outrage in the LGBT community, which saw discrimination against transgender citizens. Kavanagh responded with a revamped, more limited version, which protects businesses that bar such practices from civil or criminal liability. After a contentious seven-hour hearing on Wednesday dominated by opposition to the proposal, a House panel voted along party lines to approve it.

As the Supreme Court considers same-sex marriage, and with gay couples enjoying more rights and protections than ever, pitched debates in state capitals are a reminder that transgender rights remain unclear and controversial.

...........................................Read more: time.com

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Health & Family - A 6-Year-Old Boy 

Becomes a Girl: Do Schools Need 

New Rules for Transgender Students?

By Bonnie Rochman

A year ago, when she was in kindergarten in Fountain, Colo., Coy Mathis became a girl. Until that point, Coy — born a boy — had resisted the boyish t-shirts and jeans that her parents laid out for her, hated the boy’s backpack she had to carry to school. She wanted to wear tutus and princess dresses, to grow her hair long, to slip into pink Mary Janes.

“I am a girl,” she told her parents starting at age 3. After visits to a pediatrician and a psychologist who advised her parents, as mom Kathryn Mathis puts it, “to let her live as who she was,” they finally did. Three months after kindergarten began, Coy transitioned from being a boy to living as a girl.

Kindergarteners are pretty forgiving folks, so they accepted that Coy now wore dresses with leggings and used the girls’ bathroom. But in December, Coy’s elementary-school principal issued an ultimatum from the school district: Coy could no longer frequent the girls’ bathroom; she would have to head to private bathrooms reserved for teachers or sick children — or enter the boys’ bathroom.

....................Read more: time.com

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Transgender People in Sweden 

No Longer Face Forced Sterilization

By Rebecca Nelson

Until late last week one of Europe’s most progressive nations had one of the continent’s most repressive policies on transgender people. Swedish law had required all transgender people to undergo sterilization if they want to legally change their sex. In a Dec. 19 decision, the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal overturned the law, declaring it unconstitutional.

Sweden’s 1970s-era statutes on sexual identity mandated that any person who legally wanted to change their sex must be sterile. Transgender Swedes had to go through gender reassignment surgery to have their legal documents updated, and to comply with the law, they were also sterilized, whether or not they wanted to be.......................

Sixteen European countries currently require transgender people to be sterilized before they undergo gender reassignment surgery, including France, Portugal and Italy. In Denmark, the Netherlands and Portugal, the law is under review.
Read more: time.com