Economist

any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance”.

School district 211 officials and members of the board of education worked for months in the hope of finding a compromise. The proposed solution requires the transgender student to change and shower in private. District 211 also advertised how supportive of transgender students it is in other ways. They can list their self-identified gender and preferred name on school records as well as play on the sports team of the gender with which they identify and use the bathroom of that gender.

“I applaud the school district for trying to come to an accommodation,” says Mara Keisling, the founder and executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Even so, she argues that the transgender student should be treated exactly like the other girls and be allowed to change with them in a communal locker room if she wishes to. “It is clear that the school district doesn’t buy that she is a girl,” says Ms Keisling.

The Department of Education wants all schools to treat transgender students as they do others, which is why school district 211 risks losing $6m in federal funding and paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if it continues to insist on its stand. Losing federal funds would be a big blow at a time when Illinois is beyond broke and the state’s new Republican governor is cutting public expenditure wherever he can.

Meanwhile, hundreds of school districts are following the Department of Education’s rules without it causing them much trouble. A few objected to the rules and ran into trouble. On October 28th the Obama administration filed a legal brief in a federal appeals court backing a transgender student’s challenge of his school’s policy banning him from using the bathroom that corresponds with the gender he identifies with. Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male, sued his school in rural Virginia over a policy requiring him to use the girls’ restroom or a single-stall unisex bathroom. Some of his class mates and their parents reportedly argued that his presence in the boys’ bathroom would be disruptive and violate the male students’ privacy.

It takes courage to come out as transgender and possibly even more courage to sue a high school. The Obama administration is more supportive of the rights of transgender people than any previous administration. Much more needs to be done to end the discrimination and harassment of America’s transgender population, which is small, at around 1% of the population, but growing as more young people feel emboldened to come out.