Opinion: In the wake of sex abuse scandal, CPS prioritizes open restrooms

Before the whole COVID…thing…dominated headlines for the last 2 years, the Chicago Public School system was embroiled in a sex abuse scandal.

An explosive investigation by the Chicago Tribune titled "Betrayed" revealed at least a decade of under-reporting or limited action by the Chicago Public School district in cases of rape and sexual misconduct against students.^[1] The Tribune's investigation found more than 500 cases that, in many instances, the Chicago Public School District failed to prevent or did not properly handle.

It was scathing, to say the least.

Among the most egregious was the case of the Simeon High School track star who was raped and assaulted 40 times by her coach, Gerald Gaddy.^[2] In another, a substitute teacher at Black Magnet Elementary School was found to be grooming a 14-year-old student with lewd texts and sexually graphic propositions.^[3] There was a CPS security guard charged with sexually assaulting girls as young as 7-years-old, including his 11-year-old niece.^[4] The choir director at Payton High school making connections with students for the purpose of sexually exploiting them but no one in the school community, let alone parents, were ever informed until they found out, four years later, he was charged in an unrelated child sex crime for allegedly having sex with the child of a family friend.^[1:1]

An official report by a new office, Chicago Public Schools’ Office of the Inspector General, created after the scandal broke, opened more than 450 new investigations in fiscal year 2019 and completed 136 of those investigations over that same period. Many of those investigations were lesser policy or guideline violations (often for inappropriate or unprofessional acts or comments that crossed boundaries with students), or involved teachers sending texts or emails to students that weren’t sexual in nature but otherwise violated district policy because they were sent through unauthorized channels, for example.

Still, of the larger cases, 36 people were either fired, forced to retire, or resign, and 15 of those investigations led to criminal charges.

There was a vendor employee who exposed himself and inappropriately touched a preteen elementary school student multiple times over the course of weeks. A school bus aide who approached a high school student from behind, touched her inappropriately and made sexual comments about her body. A Chicago Public Schools principal who engaged in nonconsensual sex with a teacher at his school. A teacher who made sexually charged comments to female students and required them to write down their sexual fantasies for a graded assignment.

We won't link them all but you can view the full report here:

• Chicago Public School's Office of the Inspector General 2019 Annual Report ^[5]

The report concluded that tracking of incidents had been deeply flawed, that victims were often asked the wrong questions by untrained employees, and that the district struggled with background check inconsistencies.

None of the above includes the scandal that broke LAST MONTH at the Marine Leadership Academy which forced Chicago Public Schools to remove 12 employees and a volunteer accused in a similar sexual misconduct investigation. And none of this includes all the other allegations of financial impropriety and criminal misconduct discovered rampant through CPS.^[6]

But I don't want to dwell too much on CPS staff and CPS doesn't want you to, either. No, CPS leadership wants you to be proud of them and be awed by their infinite wisdom.

Why?

ICYMI: We’re requiring all schools to adopt new signage to make our restrooms more inclusive. This is a big step forward for gender equity for our students and staff. pic.twitter.com/4JPBdd1jQy

— CPS - Chicago Public Schools (@ChiPubSchools) November 30, 2021

That's right. The community leaders over at Chicago Public Schools - nay that's too weak of a word, let's call them heroes - the literal heroes over at Chicago Public Schools want you to be proud of them because they're requiring all schools in the district to make all restrooms gender-neutral, including the multi-stall and larger bathrooms.

One would think that after the mountains of scandal that has plagued Chicago Public Schools the last (X) amount of years, including but not limited to the above grievances, one would think that on the heels of a public health emergency that has parents on a razor thin edge like never before, one would think after they've been forced to watch their elected officials placate an inimical teacher's union that pokes and prods those parents worse than Engel's did his mother but with the same sentiment, and one would think that staring at an historic decade of declining enrollment that, while not entirely their fault, does significantly effect the financial futures of its many teachers and system with which it's based upon, CPS leadership would consider maybe, just maybe, a more conservative approach? Just this once?

Ha. Hahahaha. Haha.

The initiative, which CPS is referring to as a "big step forward for gender equity," requires its schools to display language outside of restrooms informing students, whether they are male or female, that they may use whatever restroom they prefer.

The move not only impacts the students, they say, it also effects the staff: "All CPS students and staff will have fair and equitable access to bathroom facilities that align with their gender identity."

I'd like to interrupt here to ask a few brief question of parents with children in CPS schools.

• Did you vote on this issue?
• Did you have an opportunity to provide feedback before it was implemented?
• Was there debate or dialogue or any discussion at all about these changes?
• Were you given the option for your children to opt out of any of these changes in policy?
• Were you given any notice this was happening other than a video posted on social media days before the policy took place?
• Do you have the option to send your children to a public school where boys and girls restrooms are separate?

Trick questions. No one in CPS leadership cares what you think.

Why should they, after all? They have CPS Chief Title IX Officer Camie Pratt and Deputy Chief Title IX Officer Deb Spraggins to decide for you. Again, in the wake of sex scandal, that pair proudly proclaims that, “all bathrooms are open for use by anyone who feels comfortable.”

And to those who don't feel comfortable?

Well...they're clearly not a priority for Chicago Public School leadership right now. The priority for Chicago Public School leadership right now seems to be scoring political points and padding their curriculum vitaes for potential future employment in this weird social credit existence that's been set up for us where the good sense of your policy means fuck all as long as it pisses off the right people and damned be the pawns left in your path.

Some would be embarrassed, ashamed even, to participate in such glaringly obvious partisan political activism using children's sexuality as their game pieces but, as you can see above, sadly, that's far too often the norm for children caught up in Chicago's Public School system and held hostage to ideology living under Chicago city leadership at large.

Before I'm accused of misinterpreting what is happening here, the Office of Student Protections and Title IX in Chicago have the convenience of hiding behind "updated federal guidelines" from the Biden administration.

Way back in 2016, in response to dueling lawsuits by the Department of Justice and the state of North Carolina over the so-called "bathroom law," which requires all government agencies and public schools to require multiple-occupancy public restrooms and locker-rooms be separated by "biological sex" rather than gender identity, then-President Obama's administration effectively threw up their hands and threatened the withholding of federal funds to public schools if, citing Title IX, they do not open bathrooms to how a person presently identifies rather than biologically.^[7][8] At the time, the state of North Carolina argued that only transgendered students who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery, would be allowed to use the bathroom opposite their biological birth sex.

In 2017, then-President Trump's administration lifted the Obama administration's guidelines, believing the issue best solved at the state and local level.^[9]

In June of this year, President Biden's administration rescinded the Trump-era guidelines and went back to the Obama administration's end-of-term guidelines.^[10] Concurrently, the Biden administration announced a full review and sweeping rewrite of Title IX, the results of which we do not have yet.

Since I'm here clarifying and before my readers get too worked up, let's get some other things out of the way.

To those of you reading this far, I know at least two things. First, that you are a paying subscriber so thank you. Second and more important, you're at least prudent enough of a person to not merely react to a headline or comment simply based on the general emotion of your present moment without reading beyond the headline. And thank you for that. Please continue that practice.

Please continue that practice because there will no doubt be a certain element that will react with one glance at the subject matter and you and I can snicker at them as they rant on social media because you can see this and they can't.

And there will no doubt by my mere suggestion of even thinking about this topic let alone writing on it will get me branded a transphobe or non-binary-phobe or whatever-phobe but I assure you that's not the case.

I'm not afraid of anyone, I don't believe anything crazy like sexuality is contagious or a prosperity gospel preacher can exorcise demons or other nonsense, and I most certainly believe that transgender/gender-fluid individuals are human beings, just like me, and deserve the same protections, both legal and moral, as those who are not transgender/gender-fluid. I'm not here to chastise, castigate, or upset any young individual who feels a certain way or any who are confused about the way they feel they're supposed to feel inside. I'm not here to comment on sexual identity at all, actually.

Research on the topic varies widely and I'm not going to pretend I know everything. Life and biology is...complicated. Yes, I have an opinion about the recent increase in transgendersim/gender-fluidity but that will remain separate from this discussion because I see it as a separate topic entirely.

Ultimately, it's a deeply personal matter that should be dealt with privately, particularly when it comes to young people and their hormones. My only concern and intent is to make comment on the policy and behavior of public officials.

Which brings us back to the subject...moving on...

A decade ago, in 2011, researchers believed that approximately 0.3% of the adult population thought themselves to be either transgender or gender-fluid. Within 5 years, in 2016, some researchers claimed that figure doubled to approximately 0.6% of adults.^[11] While these numbers can likely be viewed with suspicion, litigated, or argued, if true, I get the general sense that those figures likely haven't gone down.

One month ago, CPS released their official enrollment figures and, for the 2021-2022 school year, CPS counts just over 330,000 students enrolled.^[12]

If we accept all of those above statistics as accurate, let's assume for a moment those numbers can stand as a direct 1:1 ratio for school-aged children and teenagers in CPS who think of themselves as transgender or gender-fluid. It's not a direct correlation, of course, as the above surveyed adults and the subject we're discussing includes many students of an age where they don't (and shouldn't) understand what sex or sexuality even is let alone the sexuality that will define and/or significantly alter the course of the rest of their lives, but I'm going to use those approximate numbers simply for the sake of and ease of discussion.

Again, assuming the research is correct, and using the figures referenced above, that would mark the entire transgender/gender-fluid population of the CPS student body at somewhere between 1,000-2,000 students citywide experiencing transgenderism/gender-fluidity. In other words, with approximately 640 schools operating under the Chicago Public School umbrella, that would average out to approximately 2-3 students per school, at absolute maximum.

Again, we know that number is not an accurate 1:1 ratio for all Chicago Public School students, we're simply using it for discussion sake in this opinion piece.

Seems like an awful lot of politics for such a small segment of the population, right? There must have been some significant laws passed to take these measures?

As noted elsewhere, just as it was back in 2016 at the end of the Obama administration, the new guidance was issued as a "notice of interpretation" and does not carry the force of law. As such, the Chicago Public School officials made the decision to follow the Biden administration guidelines and enact this new policy, while 20 states challenge the administration and its Department of Education's "interpretation" as an overreach of federal authority and demand that such threats of restricting federal funding of public schools can only be enforced through law written by Congress.^[13]

So, yes, the leadership of Chicago Public Schools has chosen to ignore not only the comfort but compromise the safety of the rest of the student body to make 1...2...or maybe 3 students in an entire high school feel like they can maybe-sorta-kinda feel comfortable enough to use the restroom they may or may not always identify with someday in the future?

Did anyone ask all the rest of the 328,000-329,000 students in CPS who are not transgender/gender-fluid if they feel comfortable sharing restrooms with the opposite sex? Did anyone ask the approximate 164,000 female students if they feel comfortable sharing restrooms with the 164,000 males?

If the only criteria is "comfort" why do the other female students not have a say?

CPS officials have attempted to clarify that it's not true that any student who wants to use the opposite sex restroom will be allowed but, if that clarification is true, there are only more questions to ask.

Will the students who are uncomfortable have to just...hold it? Will they all be forced to wait for the single-use bathrooms? Will the uncomfortable students have to wait until they get home? Will they be given the opportunity to go home to use the restroom? Failing that, will there be an escort available to students all day, every day? Who is the decision-maker to say one is allowed over another? Who decides a student's "comfort" with using a particular restroom? Will there be an official available to make these decisions available throughout the day? Are they elected? Are they appointed? What guidelines are they subject to abide and who can write or regulate those guidelines or will they be given full discretion and left up to their subjective interpretation? What recourse do students and parents have if that person determines one direction or the other? Who is responsible? Who is in charge? Who watches the Watchmen of children's sexuality?

It's okay, you don't have to answer. We know CPS leadership's answer. Your questions don't matter. They've already proceeded with the policy.

I have another rhetorical.

Has anyone asked the students who may be experiencing transgenderism/gender-fluidity if this is what they want? These arguments rarely get brought up in these discussions but, were any of those individuals asked?

I doubt it. I've seen no evidence they did. But parents are supposed to believe CPS leadership is interested in protecting its students without consulting them first?

Oh wait, silly me. According to officials we're all expected to treat these very adult decisions and observe these very adult decisions only the way these children want. According to officials, the children are able to make very adult demands and it's now adult's obligation to cater to those demands.

That's how parenting and adulting works these days, right?

After all, according to school officials, this is an entirely healthy and completely reasonable expectation for the behavior of children as they are ostensibly able to define and defend their sexuality for the rest of their lives as young as...you know...whenever...?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I mean, you can't treat children very much as adults in one sense and very much as children in another, right? So if they're capable of making very adult decisions about their sexuality, they should be able to deal with the other very adult issues that go along with it, no?

Were any of the individuals asked the very adult follow up questions about the safety and comfort of the other students? Were any of the one or two students in a school asked, something akin to, "In order to allow you to use the restroom of the gender you identify with, we will have to allow all male students, across all of CPS, access to the female restrooms. Is that what you want us to do? Is that fair?"

Again, I doubt it. Why?

Yet, with the snap of administration fingers, the children of today are expected by officials like CPS Chief Title IX Officer Camie Pratt and Deputy Chief Title IX Officer Deb Spraggins to understand their adult sexuality and everything that comes with it while, apparently, they are unable to understand that the comfort and safety of their friends, notably their female friends, is to be deemed less important than their ability to use the restroom of the gender they may or may not understand they identify at that moment in their life?

If Chicago Public School officials like CPS Chief Title IX Officer Camie Pratt and Deputy Chief Title IX Officer Deb Spraggins do not believe transgender/gender-fluid students to be grown up enough and mature enough to understand why there is or would be a general separation of boys and girls in regards to biological sex and restroom policies, why are parents supposed to accept that the children of today are grown up enough and mature enough to make the decisions about the sexuality that will affect the rest of their days and make it the official policy of CPS?

Their answer, of course, will be something further akin to the high-raised nose dismissal, "that's why we said whomever feels comfortable."

But that's not good enough.

It's not good enough because it's defined for all students and staff, including those who don't feel comfortable with something as private and personal as using the restroom with the opposite biological sex.

Let's take another perspective.

To my adult female readers, I want you to recall your average day. Recall all the men you encounter throughout.

The men at your favorite coffeeshop in the morning. The men in your office. On lunch. At the grocery store. At bars and the restaurants. Recall all the men on the street you cross paths with, every single day.

Then I want you to imagine (poof) every where you go throughout your average day it is now official policy that the restrooms you use are open to all of them. Not just the single-use bathrooms, but all of them, "as long as they feel comfortable."

Now ask yourself one more simple question for me.

How much more difficult did your day just become?

Now imagine it's your local government's official policy and you're a teenager.

You may think, "Well the worst could happen and does happen at any time anyway..." And, sure, you're right. It's a sad consequence of our world that there are bad people who do bad things.

Of course, #notallmen make you feel uncomfortable and I'm sure you know many that would leap to your defense. And, yes, you may live your entire life and never be forced to deal with such a situation but...I suspect...I'd be willing to bet...that if every adult female reading this were honest they had at least one pause of a man they wouldn't want to share a restroom with as they cycled through the memory of their average day.

All right, let's wrap this up.

I may have ignored this issue entirely if we were strictly discussing individual restrooms with only one toilet and a lock on the door, but we're not.^[14] I may have ignored this issue entirely if parents and students in this city and this state were given the choice, a true choice, of what school to send their children and if those schools were truly given the autonomy to make decisions on their own. I may have ignored this issue if the due diligence was given to all parents and students to weigh in and it were not scuttled under a cloak of such palpable pretense.

This is not a guarantee something bad will happen.

When I was in school years ago, most of the guys I knew would have "preferred" to use the girl's restroom or locker rooms, too (ba-dum-tiss), but we didn't. We laughed at bad teenage boy jokes and we teased each other about pushing one another inside the girls' locker rooms, but we never tried to change with them. The girls restroom and locker rooms were off-limits. It was a place for the girls to get away from our immaturity and a place for them to be immature and talk and joke about us just as much as we joked about them. The restrooms and locker rooms sometimes serving as a welcome respite and small place to get away from the seemingly endless onslaught of hormones and life inexperience.

A kid in our graduating class was gay and, we'd learn later, at various times, tried out the drag scene and struggled with understanding if he was transgender. No, he wasn't allowed to use the girls' locker room but he was allowed to be active with the traditionally girl's dance team. There was another guy from an upper class who dated a friend of mine who absolutely was in love with him despite all of us knowing way back when and, sure enough, he was and eventually came out to her first, thankfully. There was the girl on the softball team who back then was and today is more tough than many men I know and has the bisexual wife she won over to prove it. I'm sure there are more I never knew their private affairs.

Those I mentioned above are all successful and doing fine.

While those stories are anecdotal, I bring them up to point out these issues are not foreign to kids and they can deal with it as their lives progress without administrators and adults stumbling over themselves to pander for political points. The last thing a kid needs is CPS administrators and staff policing ridiculous and unnecessary policies, particularly surrounding said kids' undeveloped and confused sexuality.

As you can see at the very top, CPS staff "interference" in sexuality is absolutely the last thing any kid needs.

I'll say again for those in the back, I'm not here to judge any kid experiencing these issues. This is not about that.

This is about the absurdity of your children's school officials prioritizing politics over and instead of focusing on real world, substantial solutions to poor schools. The absurdity of forcing your children to confront very adult, very political issues and using your children as political footballs for their own political goals rather than let them just be kids.

It's this posturing from CPS leadership that highlights the larger concerns about what is being taught at CPS Schools. They believe themselves to be doing great things for transgender/gender-fluid children, for all children under their care, but they're doing them a profound disservice by not preparing them for fundamental realities about the world at large.

You can only teach children how to prepare for the world. Not the other way around. They're going to learn life's lessons, just as we all do, with or without you.

The kid I knew who struggled with his identity I mentioned above? Yep, he's still gay. Has a happy husband. And he looks back in horror at how different his life could have turned out if someone had pushed him to do something to his body when he was a young, undeveloped person who knew nothing more than that he thought a boy in his class was cute and that he liked to dance to the late-'90s/early-'00s female pop stars.

To state it one more time, I have no doubt, for those experiencing these issues, life is difficult to understand. I'm not going to pretend I understand how it feels to have your mind or body tell you one thing while the other tells you otherwise but I have breaking news: life is difficult to understand even for those like me who've been straight, white men all along.

Oh, I'm sure there are individual cases here and anecdotes there and media stories to be found about transgender/gender-fluid adults who are confident and comfortable with all that followed their decision to live their lives openly as such. I'm not saying this or that does not exist.

I merely question that every student in CPS who feels that way must feel this way. I question that they all wanted, needed, demanded to use the restroom of the gender they identify with and I question if they all agreed to compromising the comfort and safety of their female and male friends who are not like them. I question the ignorance and arrogance of CPS leadership to believe that they can make changes like this without the input of parents and expect children, literal children, to all of a sudden be "okay with" and "accepting" of all the very adult issues something like this comes with. I question why this is necessary for children to deal with at all.

Most important, I question the traditional development of students being sacrificed for the personal politics of CPS officials and I question if CPS leadership even bothered to ask any of these genuine questions of themselves at all or, in their anxious self-righteous reflection of who they think they are, did they throttle forward through the foggy clouds of their own perception of what they think "social justice" is at the expense of the students in their care?

Because this is what it all boils down to, doesn't it? This is what all the recent genius efforts toward "inclusivity" get twisted and mixed up and confused and intentionally obfuscated, don't they?

Politics.

No matter how hard they try to frame this as such, this is not a fundamental human rights issue. No matter how hard they seek to indemnify themselves under a vague veil as champions of civil rights, this is simply adults playing politics. Adults playing politics and using childhoods as their game pieces.

No matter how much certain race hustlers like to pretend it is, this is not the Jim Crow era where kids, unable to change the color of the skin they were born with by taking pills or hormone injections or even going so far as to have surgery, are separated by that color and restricted from entire schools or from using restrooms or water fountains, etc. This is not an ADA compliance issue where physically disabled children, unable to walk and/or forced to face this enduring and eternal existential crisis we know as life do so with the added burdens of being confined to a wheelchair or worse, genuinely can not or could not use certain facilities due to these physical limitations of access. I promise, my tune would be entirely different if it were.

And I promise, the answer to teenage mental health, transgender/gender-fluid or otherwise, is not going to be found in gender-neutral restrooms and to suggest so is preposterous.

This is about kids, many of whom would still tell you they want ice cream for breakfast every day if you'd let them, many of whom have never even experienced their first kiss let alone understand what their sexual identity is, and many of whose only worries are and whose only worries should be if the cute boy or girl in their math class agrees to be their date to the school dance, being tossed around and forced to confront very adult and very private issues.

CPS leadership has once again thrown these very real and very adult issues to the feet of your kids to deal with instead of just letting them be kids.

While being the actual manifestation of the metaphor, instead of being the adults in the room full of children CPS leadership has once again chosen to force kids to feel responsible for the cause and effect of the political ideologies the adults commit themselves toward.

And, once again, CPS leadership is dismissing and hiding behind their deeply flawed behavior, leaving these issues to untrained employees, and struggling with inconsistencies in their policies. This time, they do so willingly.

CPS enrollment is down nearly 20% over the last decade and it is down an additional 3% again this year. I wonder when they'll figure out why?

On the bright side, if the trend continues, no administrators and no parents and no kids will have to worry about open restroom policies anymore or the politics of education at CPS because there will be no one left to go.

For the sake of the kids, one can only hope.

Notes & References