This article brought to you by Maryland Muckraker.

A boy who considers himself a girl entered and used the girls bathroom at Century High School in Carroll County a couple weeks ago. One girl who was in the bathroom at the same time felt uneasy about what she saw, so she notified the school’s administration. 

A whistleblower & a principal

Two days later the whistleblowing girl was called down to Assistant Principal Jane Clark’s office to discuss the matter. She told Clark she was concerned about what could happen with a boy in the girls bathroom. And she pointed out how all the other transgender students she knows use the staff bathroom, which is single use and therefore sex neutral. 

Clark responded, telling the girl that she too can use the staff bathroom if she is uncomfortable with the situation in the girls bathroom. The girl replied, confused, asking why she should be the one to get pushed out of the girls bathroom. Shouldn’t the boy who considers himself a girl be the one to use the staff bathroom? 

Clark explained that no one is being pushed out of any bathroom, but confirmed that in Carroll County Public Schools, when it comes to which bathroom to use, students gets to choose. 

Clark is right. That effectively is the rule in Carroll County and beyond. 

Bathroom judges

Westminster lawyer Ed O’Meally, the Carroll County Board of Education’s retained legal counsel, knows this well. In 2018 he represented the Talbot County Board of Education when they were sued for sex discrimination after telling a 15 year old girl who considers herself a boy that she is disallowed from changing for gym class with the boys in the boys lockeroom. 

The Talbot Board said the boys at St. Michael’s High School have a right to privacy and should not have to change for gym class in the same room as a girl. They asked the court to interpret the definition of sex narrowly, applying only to the girl’s biological sex at birth, not her gender identity.  

The girl at issue is named Max. Max and her parents could have remained private, but they chose to publicize the lawsuit and Max’s gender transition story. A Washington Post reporter wrote that when Max was a child, she preferred trucks over dolls. And by sixth grade, she knew she was a boy. Then after a therapist diagnosed her with gender dysphoria, she started weekly testosterone shots and eventually underwent a double mastectomy.  

The federal judge in Baltimore presiding over Max’s case against Talbot was George Russell III, an Obama appointee who secured his undergraduate degree from an all-male historically black college (Morehouse). He determined that Max’s right to change with the boys was protected under Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in federally funded education. He said because Max (a girl) identifies as a boy, he deserves to be treated exactly like every other boy.    

Jennifer Kent, a lawyer representing Max with FreeState Justice, the Maryland LGBTQ activist organization that launched the suit, reacted to Russell’s favorable ruling saying Maryland public schools have been put on notice: treating transgender students unequally is illegal. (Kent was later named a Title IX coordinator at McDaniel College)    

The outcome of Max’s lawsuit against Talbot informed a similar case in a higher court, where a girl named Grimm who considers herself a boy sued the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia after they insisted she use the bathroom consistent with her biological sex. When two Obama appointed judges sided with Grimm, confirming she had been discriminated against, Gloucester County was ordered to pay more than $1.3M in legal fees.    

The Virginia School Board petitioned the Supreme Court to review the decision and potentially reverse it, but only two of the nine justices would have accepted (Thomas, Alito).  

Obama’s Department of Education

The extreme rulings made by the judges in the cases of Max and Grimm are consistent with guidance published by the Obama administration’s Department of Education in a 2016 Dear Colleague letter, which radically reinterpreted sex discrimination under Title IX to include gender identity, effectively making any biological sex segregation at all, including in bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams, discriminatory the moment any transgender person demands admittance into what had previously been a sex segregated space.  

For Assistant Principal Clark to insist that the boy who considers himself a girl remain out of the girls bathroom would be to discriminate against him on the basis of gender identity, a new protected class. 

None of this is to suggest that mixed sex bathroom usage is an everyday occurrence in Carroll County Public Schools. As the whistleblowing girl said, all the transgender students she knows use the staff bathrooms which are single use and sex neutral. In this specific instance, the boy who entered the girls bathroom appears to have done so for the sake of transgression alone.  

One person with knowledge of the process explained how, when a student comes out as transgender, a meeting takes place between the student, their parents, and the school’s administration, with the intention of aligning on a plan for that student. 

But as we’ve seen, students technically have the civil right to demand entry into whichever bathroom or locker room they want as long as it matches their gender identity. Which goes to show how a far-away legal and administrative bureaucracy has the power to reach into an otherwise unsuspecting local community and impose a radical social policy onto it.