Jacalyn Carfagno: Ky. Senate seeks to exclude some kids just because they're different

I'm having trouble understanding why the Kentucky Senate's spent so much time on school bathroom policy.

Superintendents, school administrators, teachers and board members did not bang on the Capitol doors begging the General Assembly to find a way to accommodate transgender students' bathroom needs.

Atherton High School in Louisville had worked it out already, allowing students to use the restroom of their gender identity. A student who views herself as a female and dresses like one can go into the girls rest room, go into a stall and do what she needs to do. Vice versa for biological girls who identify as males.

But Sen. C. B. Embry plunged ahead with Senate Bill 76 requiring transgender students to use the bathroom of their biological sex or to use separate facilities, such as a unisex bathroom or the faculty restroom.

The first time it came before the Senate Education Committee, Thursday of polar vortex week, only Embry, R-Morgantown, and Martin Cothran of the Family Foundation spoke for it.

Neither offered any example of any problem that had arisen as a result of a transgender student using the bathroom of his or her gender identity.

Among those who spoke against it were a transgender student, Henry Brousseau, and Tom Aberli, principal of Atheron.

Henry, who was born female but has lived as a boy for three years, said he wants to live and be treated like "a normal kid." But that wasn't possible when he had to use a unisex bathroom. "I was outing myself every time I had to go in there."

Aberli described the lengthy, public process his school's site-based council went through in researching, developing and adopting, by a vote of 9 to 1, the policy. That policy has been broadly accepted by the school community without incident, he said.

Sen. Reggie Thomas, D-Lexington, shared my confusion. "Why do we even need this bill?" he asked.

The question went unanswered but the bill won a majority, 6 to 3. Thanks to poor attendance due to the bad weather that was one vote shy of the seven needed to advance to the full Senate.

But the Senate, in its zeal to solve a non-problem, brought it up again the following Monday when more sympathetic committee members were present. It passed out with eight votes. The Senate approved it Friday 27 to 9.

Embry and Cothran produced witnesses Monday — a young woman who is a sophomore at Atherton and her father.

David Kelty spun out a convoluted scenario in which under Atherton's policy if a boy entered the girls restroom or vice versa and someone complained they might run afoul of "the transgender community."

Thomas asked Kelty's daughter, Christina, if anything bad had actually happened. No, nothing. But she said girls who might have been sexually assaulted by a male (non-trans) "will feel unsafe with someone with male genitalia in their restrooms."

Under this logic, transgender students would be banished to separate restrooms because a girl had been assaulted by a non-trans boy.

I don't mean to make fun of Christina or her father. We have all been uncomfortable around people who are different from us, be they homeless or transgender or foreign or just scary. It's the way we're wired as pack animals, to be suspicious of those from outside our pack.

But it seems to me the point of government is to enlarge the pack so a wide array of people can coexist peacefully, whether we're comfortable with each other or not.

That's why it's so hard to understand the point of SB 76. It proposes to cull people out of the pack not because they've broken the rules or hurt someone but because they are different.

And that's just the opposite of what government exists to do.

Reach Jacalyn Carfagno at jcarfagno@herald-leader.com or at 231-1652.

This story was originally published March 1, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Jacalyn Carfagno: Ky. Senate seeks to exclude some kids just because they're different."