School Sued For Refusing To Allow Transgendered Six-Year-Old Boy To Use Girls' Restroom

Colorado Springs, CO – An LGBT advocacy group is suing an elementary school in Colorado Springs for barring a six-year-old boy from using the girls’ restroom. The group claims that the child is being discriminated against because of his sexual orientation.

The New-York-based Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights group, made public a letter from Kelly Dude, attorney for the Colorado Springs school district and Eagleside Elementary School.

In that letter, the school’s attorney said, “The district’s decision took into account not only Coy but other students in the building, their parents and the future impact a boy with male genitals using a girls’ bathroom would have as Coy grew older.”

The school said that Coy could use the boys’ bathroom, a staff bathroom, or the nurse’s bathroom and made it plain that Coy had not been denied access to educational services. But the boy’s parents weren’t satisfied with these concessions.

Coy’s mother said her son has lived as a girl, including using the girls’ bathroom at school, dressing in girls’ clothing, and having teachers refer to her as a girl. “We socially transitioned her to a girl, which at that age means merely changing pronouns and growing her hair out,” Kathryn Mathis told a local newspaper.

When Coy was denied access to the girls’ restroom at school, the parents elected to home school the child to avoid “bullying and harassment.”

Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow with the Family Research Council, recently addressed a similar issue before the Maryland Senate. In that case he spoke to Senate Bill 449 that would provide discrimination protection for transgender people in laws regarding public spaces, housing, and employment.

“I have compassion for those who suffer from gender identity problems,” said Sprigg. “I do not underestimate the pain that people experience when they want to be, or believe that they are, something different from their biological sex. However, the solution offered, or implied, in the bill simply will not be effective in easing that pain,” Sprigg said. “A person who believes they are, or wishes to be, the opposite sex from that which is written in the chromosomes of every cell of his or her body, is suffering from a disconnection with an immutable biological reality,”

However Sprigg also noted: “The solution to this problem is not actions – up to and including self-mutilating surgery amputating healthy body parts – which will reinforce this disconnect with reality. The solution is compassionate counseling aimed at helping the individual to uncover the psychological roots of their gender identity problems, and to become comfortable with one’s actual biological sex.”