Two daycare workers at the Children’s Lighthouse Learning Center in Katy, Texas were fired recently for refusing to treat a six-year-old girl as a boy. One of the fired workers said that sometimes the little girl refers to herself as a boy and other times she tells classmates not to call her a boy and not to use her masculine name. But her parents, two males, have given her a boy’s haircut and insist she be treated accordingly.

Breitbart Texas interviewed one of the workers, Madeline Kirksey, the author of a Christian book. She said that the biggest concern she and her fired colleague had was that they would be telling this little girl’s young classmates that she is a boy when she is not. She told the Houston Fox news station, “I don’t think we should be talking to other people’s children, who are under the age of 18, about being
transgender.”

Katy, Texas is near Houston where the transgender issue has received national attention of late. Voters overwhelmingly defeated a so-called non-discrimination ordinance that would have, among other so-called “sexual orientation and gender identity protections,” allowed men who identify as women to use women’s restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities. These SOGI laws are being enacted by governing bodies in states and localities all over the country. In some places, like Houston, citizens are resisting.

Bathrooms are a major battleground. The school locker room is becoming a bigger one. Increasingly, high schools confront demands that transgender students be allowed to use the locker room that corresponds to their gender identity, which may not correspond to their biological sex.

Just last week, Township High School District 211 in Palatine, Illinois received notice from the U.S. Department of Education that it is violating Title IX by not providing a transgender student open use of girls’ locker rooms. The district has 30 days to reach an agreement with authorities or risk losing up to $6 million in federal funding and face a possible criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

The student in question has been undergoing hormone therapy, but is, anatomically, a boy. For two years the school district has bent over backwards to accommodate his demands, including allowing him to participate in girls’ sports. The school proposed installing privacy stations in the locker room, so this “intact male” would not be fully observable to the girls, and so they would not have to undress out in the open. But the feds said it’s unfair to require the transgender student to use privacy curtains.

This student said, “The district’s policy stigmatized me, often making me feel like I was not a ‘normal’ person.” A normal person accepts their God-given gender. Glamour Magazine is naming Bruce Jenner “Woman of the Year.” But federal bureaucrats should know better than to insist that the disordered claims of some troubled individuals outweigh the safety and well-being of America’s students.