Lawmaker Wants To Pay Students $2,500 If They See A Transgender Person In The ‘Wrong’ Bathroom

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http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/01/15/3611920/kentucky-transgender-bathroom-ban/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=tptop3&utm_campaign=tptop3


BY ZACK FORD POSTED ON JANUARY 15, 2015 AT 9:14 AM UPDATED: JANUARY 15, 2015 AT 10:34 AM



Kentucky State Sen. C.B. Embry, Jr. (R) casting a vote in the House in March, 2014.
CREDIT: FACEBOOK/C.B. EMBRY, JR.


Last year, Atherton High School in Louisville approved a policy ensuring that transgender students can access all spaces and activities in accordance with their gender identity, but now a Kentucky state senator wants to ban all transgender students from safely using the bathroom.

Sen. C.B. Embry Jr. (R) has introduced what he calls the Kentucky Student Privacy Act (SB 76), which would force all students to be identified by their “biological sex” as determined by their chromosomes and what was assigned to them according to their anatomy at birth, essentially erasing transgender students. The bill requires that bathrooms and locker rooms must be divided according to “biological sex,” and schools are forbidden from accommodating transgender students by allowing them access to any facility “designated for use by students of the opposite biological sex while students of the opposite biological sex are present or could be present.”

Instead, transgender students requiring accommodation must settle for “access to single-stall restrooms, access to unisex bathrooms, or controlled use of faculty bathrooms, locker rooms, or shower rooms.” This means that if the only such facility is in the nurse’s office, for example, a student would be required to schlep as far as that office is to use the restroom — or not go at all.
Moreover, Embry wants to actually punish schools (like Atherton) that respect trans students’ identities. The bill provides that any student who encounters “a person of the opposite biological sex” in a bathroom or locker room shall have a legal cause of action if it’s because the school gave the trans student permission or didn’t explicitly prohibit the trans student from using that facility. The “aggrieved” student would be entitled to $2,500 from the offending school “for each instance” he or she encountered a trans student in a sex-divided facility in addition to monetary damages “for all psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered” and attorney fees.

FULL story at link.