School Faces Bipartisan Backlash After Banishing Girls From Own Locker Room Over Transgender Complaint

Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Vermont are siding with a girl’s volleyball team which has been banished from their own locker room for complaining about being forced to change in front of a male team member who says he identifies as a female.

Blake Allen, one of the banished members of the Randolph High School Volleyball team in Vermont said the teenage girls have been told they must now change in a single-stall bathroom while the male teammate is permitted to continue to use the girl’s locker room, according to WCAX-TV 3 in Vermont.

Rep. Jay Hooper, a Democrat representing Randolph, said that even liberal parents do not support allowing boys in girls locker rooms.

“I hear about this constantly,” said Hooper, who is currently running a campaign for a fourth term. “People are actually kind of livid.”

Hooper said it doesn’t make any sense to label a locker room based on “traditional genders” and then kick out the majority who fall under that gender.

Orange County Republican Rodney Graham told The Epoch Times that it just “seems like common sense” for the school to have the boy change in the bathroom stall.

“It seems to make sense to weigh this as a majority versus minority,” he said.

Graham said he doesn’t think it’s ever appropriate to ask teenage girls to change around a male.

Since the broadcast of the story over the weekend, the Orange County school district along with its school committee has suspended all of its website pages.

Allen, one of the girls on the volleyball team, said the boy also made inappropriate comments to some of the female volleyball team members in the locker rooms, but according to the Vermont TV station report, the school sent an email home to parents that the girls are the ones under investigation.

“I feel like for stating my opinion—that I don’t want a biological man changing with me—that I should not have harassment charges or bullying charges,” Allen told the TV station.

It is unclear how many female players are involved in the controversy. A typical volleyball team consists of 12 players.

The incident is similar to the case of Julie Jaman, the 80-year old woman banished for life from a YMCA in Washington in August for objecting to a male counselor being in the women’s shower area. After Jaman demanded the counselor leave, Y officials accused her of discrimination and told her to leave and never return.

In responding to the Vermont controversy, Jaman told The Epoch Times that schools are essentially subjecting girls to voyeurism and maybe even sexual exploitation.

“This is basically a potential set up for young men to carry out sneaky plots to have access to young women and go back to their fraternities or friends and brag about,” said Jaman, “they could even be videotaping them.”

Prior to suspending their websites, school officials said they were committed to making the boy feel safe as part of their obligations under a state law that prohibits schools from barring students who identify with a gender different from their biological one from school facilities.

However, the Vermont law also states that “all students have a right to feel safe at school.”

Vermont, considered one of the most liberal states in the U.S., has the seventh largest LGBT population in the country and the highest rate of same-sex couples, according to a recent report by the University of California’s Williams Institute.

However, not everyone in the gay community supports transgenderism. In England, a group called Mermaids, which supports transgendering children, recently filed a lawsuit against the Charity Commission, for granting charity status to the LGB Alliance, which truncates the LGBTQ+ acronym to reflect its opposition to gender identity ideology.