Rep. Bill Flores
Seventy-three House Republicans are reportedly challenging the Obama administration’s authority to issue schools guidance on the restroom use of their trans student population.
Texas state representative Bill Flores, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, is urging “members to sign on to a letter, pushing the Departments of Education and Justice to detail how, and on what authority, they plan to enforce the new guidelines,” as The Daily Signal, a conservative news site run by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, reports.
“Americans are incensed by President Obama’s blatant executive overreach,” Flores told the conservative website. “Now they are threatening school funding over an issue that should rightfully be left to the states. Their actions are politically motivated and Congress has every responsibility to challenge them.”
[…]
North Carolina state representative Mark Walker, who authored the letter, believes that the Obama directive poses a danger to schools. Walker told The Daily Caller, a conservative website, that the decision of trans bathroom access should be up to individual administrators to make, not the federal government or youth. He said it allows students to make up the rules “from one week to the next.”
“If a 17 year-old young man wants to go shower with the girls on the soccer team,” Walker argued, “he’s allowed to do that because of his will or his gender fluidity for the week [he] can tell the teacher ‘this [is] what I’m feeling, this is where I’m at’ and she has no recourse to step in.”
Fuck me, but these idiots are beyond tiresome. They are utterly ignoring gender dysphoria and transgender people in favour of this nebulous ‘gender flu[idity]’ that people are going to mysteriously come down with whenever.
Walker’s fear, however, is unfounded. In the more than 200 localities across the United States that have passed nondiscrimination laws providing equal access in public accommodations, there’s never been a reported case of a cisgender person — student or otherwise — pretending to be trans to gain access to the opposite-sex facilities.
[…]
This statement is strikingly similar to an earlier dispatch from Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia, issued by their states’ attorneys general. “The so-called ‘significant guidance’ issued by the Obama Administration raises more questions than it answers, just as it creates concerns among anyone who believes sex is a biological fact and not a personal preference,” Texas state representative Ken Paxton argued in a May 17 statement.
Oh, gender is a biological fact, it just resides in the brain, not the genitals. It would certainly be nice if these people would exercise their brains a bit. This is starting to sound suspiciously like the creationism vs evolution fight. Might be nice if they remembered they lost that one. At any rate, these are bloody guidelines, it isn’t law, it isn’t an order, it isn’t enforceable.
It’s kind of enforceable if the US Federal government can withdraw funding for a State government. I’m not American so I don’t know if that’s true, but the only people punished by that are the poor who need those facilities.
Nonetheless, I wish they’d stop talking about bio sex as “a” fact. Human sex determination is, in fact, hundreds of “facts.”
Siobhan:
That’s true, but that’s only been threatened in the case of NC because of HB 2, and that isn’t happening because NC is suing the feds, and knows they won’t do anything until the case is settled.
As I recall Obama simply repeated a law already in effect.
Only Repubes can get outraged over that.
If I recall correctly — which I may not be — the guidelines are clarifying the matter is covered by Title IX, which is very enforceable. According to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge, Title IX has been considered to apply since 2014, suggesting the recent action is, in part, a restatement of existing policy.
As commander in chief of the military, Obama could fuck NC so hard with a stroke of a pen. He’s just not the muslim communist dictator who’d do that kind of thing.
How much $ does the army contribute to NC’s economy?
Ft Bragg.
Probably the federal gov’t shouldn’t be operating a military base there in NC where bathroom rules are so complicated. Close it.
Marcus:
That’s downright wicked. I love it.
@Siobhan, most of the funds that run state government are generated within the state and not handed down from the federal government. But a substantial amount of money flows from the feds to the states in various streams: Medicare and Social Security payments, direct federal employment like the aforementioned Fort Bragg, small business loans, farm subsidies, and more. Our more conservative states have a record of receiving more federal money than they generate in federal taxes, making them “moochers” by the Republican standard of accounting.
That’s a good way of putting it. Determining gender from genitals or chromosomes alone actually ignores substantial chunks of reality. It’s just more complicated than that.