What about rights to safety and privacy?

In 2000, a girl at Powers High School was banned from walking in her graduation and made nationwide news when she took a shower with the boys in the boys' locker room. This spring, schools all over the state of Oregon and nation are being told they must allow girls to shower in the boys' locker room and vice versa. Huh?

The recent craze to allow transgender people to choose whichever restroom they feel comfortable in overrules the rights of 99.7 percent of the population to safety and privacy. Individual transgendered people may not be a risk, but the new directives open the door wide to

abuse by perverts and pedophiles.

In response to North Carolina's new law, which allows businesses to restrict restroom use to biological gender, Target announced that people of any gender are welcome to use whichever dressing room or restroom they like. Eleven days later a girl in Target was distressed to realize that a man in the women's changing room was filming her as she was dressing.

Perhaps our Oregon Department of Education was well-intentioned when they recently released 15 pages of "guidelines" on how transgender students should be treated. But there are numerous unintended consequences to the "guidelines," which already are being treated as having the force of law in Dallas, Oregon. Dallas School District's lawyers have arbitrarily decided that they would lose in a court so they will not "cave to community pressure" to resist the directive. Bizarrely, the principal is offering alternative dressing arrangements to the objecting students rather than the more rational approach of providing a separate dressing arrangement for the transgender student.

A major problem in America is sexual abuse of children. School superintendents are expressing grave concern about how this could impact their students' safety. Many children will be afraid to go to the bathroom now that there are no limits on who can be in there. People who think hormone-driven teens who have been raised with easy access to pornography won't abuse this "right" are delusional.

The American College of Pediatricians has posted a temporary statement on the topic of children being encouraged to express themselves as the opposite sex. "Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse." Puberty-blocking hormones and cross-sex hormones are associated with dangerous health risks. The authors further noted that 98% of boys and 88% of girls who are confused about their gender eventually come to terms with how they were born after puberty.

Transgender people have an appallingly high suicide rate. Why would anyone want to condemn young children to this fate, especially knowing that most of them would have eventually accepted the actuality of their biological sex? Their biological sex is stamped on every single cell in their bodies. "Facts -not ideology - determine reality."

It seems like we have fallen into Alice in Wonderland's nonsensical world. We have moved from civil rights based on immutable concrete criteria of race and natural-born sex, to civil rights based on a subjective feeling.

Gender-confused people deserve our compassion, but the vast majority of the population's rights to privacy and safety clearly should trump a tiny minority's desire to feel accepted. Forcing people to feel violated, uncomfortable, and unsafe will decrease acceptance of transgenders.

Our state and federal governments are bulldozing America's laws with their arbitrary mandates and threats to withdraw funding. At what point will we say enough is enough? We can stop this madness only if we unite and huge numbers of people rise up now to oppose this lunacy.