Volleyball team, Vermont

[DdraigGoch]

Same old, same old. Male student is allowed to join girls' team and use their changing rooms. The male student just sits at the back watching the girls change and makes inappropriate comments, making the girls feel uncomfortable. Naturally the school's response is to ban the girls from their own changing room and make them change in the toilet - all ten of them queuing for one stall.

abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/school-bans-girls-volleyball-team-from-locker-room-following-complaints-about-trans-player-transgender-women-bathroom-privacy-vermont-randolph-high

Women and girls often talk across cubicles. According to my dh and my sons, it's not something men do.

So it might not occur to a male to call out and ask from within the cubicle.

Looking out could have been ignorance how girls behave. Or it might not...

Either way, perfectly reasonable response from the girls.

Funny how the young male is believed when he says he feels like a girl, yet he has absolutely no idea how to behave like a girl, no idea of the social norms, no idea of the feelings of females and how they'd view his behaviour as voyeuristic, or in teen speak - "creepy".

Almost like he's not a girl at all.

Yes, very well put.

I don't think biological males should be in female spaces but this situation has upset everyone and helped no one. Society needs to find a way to get the greatest good out of the situation but I don't think there's an easy answer. Someone will not get what they want.

Third spaces are the compromise solution.

I can’t really see any other approaches that keep all pupils (girls, boys, pupils of either sex who identify as the opposite or as non binary) physically safe, respect the accepted standards of same-sex privacy & dignity while undressing, and minimise both the opportunities for social misunderstanding and opportunities for bullying a trans student.

Not that I believe these girls WERE bullying the trans student, but I bet 10 plus teenage girls all loudly telling you to go away in unison FEELS like bullying, especially if you’ve been told by your parents, your head teacher and the T lobby that the girls have no right to object to your presence.

Adult activist demands for ‘acceptance without exception’ are causing the situations that harm the very children they claim to be protecting.

According to the mother, her [male teenager] was changing in the [girls'] locker room before volleyball practice when three [female] teammates began to yell at [him] to get out and stop looking at them... My initial reaction was outrage but I'm willing to concede maybe the trans kid was being bullied.

So a group of girls yelling at a teenage boy to stop looking at them getting changed are just bullying him for no reason? Why would anyone assume that, instead of assuming that they yelled at him to stop looking at him, because he was looking at them? Even the mother's own account makes her child sound like a creep. And the account of the girls is that he didn't leave when asked to. I'm personally inclined to believe the teenagers who are demonstrating incredible courage and character by speaking up in their real names, over the teenager who was keen to hang out in the opposite-sex locker room.

But it's true that whatever the facts of the matter, the policy is the problem, not the individual teenager, who should never been allowed in there in the first place.