From The Advocate: http://www.advocate.com/print-issue/current-issue/2013/04/05/not-so-elementary-trans-students-fight-her-school
When a Colorado school told a 6-year-old transgender girl she could no longer use the girls’ bathroom, her parents fought back.
BY Sunnivie Brydum
April 05 2013
A family in colorado has filed a complaint with the state Civil Rights Commission against the Fountain–Fort Carson school district, alleging an elementary school discriminated against a 6-year-old transgender girl when she was forbidden to use the girls’ bathroom after a year of doing so.
Coy Mathis is a first-grader enrolled at Eagleside Elementary School in Fountain, a suburb of Colorado Springs. Although Coy was assigned as male at birth, she has identified as female since she was 18 months old. Coy dresses in girls’ clothing, and teachers, classmates, and her family use female pronouns to refer to her.
Since 2011, when she was in kindergarten, Coy has been using the girls’ bathroom at Eagleside without incident. But last December Eagleside principal Jason Crow informed her parents, Kathryn and Jeremy Mathis, that their daughter would no longer be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom. Coy could only use the boys’ bathroom, a staff bathroom, or a single-stall restroom in the health center.
Kathryn Mathis says that when she and her husband challenged Crow on the reasoning behind the sudden policy change, the administrator had no coherent response.
“The first inkling of an answer we got was when their lawyers responded [to the initial request],” says Mathis. She calls the district’s written response “heartbreaking” and says school district lawyers repeatedly referred to Coy as a boy, used male pronouns to describe her, and even discussed how “as she gets older, how her male genitals are going to grow—which isn’t appropriate at all for them to be discussing, because they’re a school system, not her doctor.”
Continue reading at: http://www.advocate.com/print-issue/current-issue/2013/04/05/not-so-elementary-trans-students-fight-her-school
