'Hybrid Icon' May Adorn Some Restrooms at Univ. of Colorado
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
May 9, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A campus watchdog group is criticizing a task force at the University of Colorado-Boulder for claiming the school's bathrooms are discriminatory against transgender people.
The "Transgender/GenderQueer Task Force" at UC-Boulder is reportedly working with school officials to bring more "unisex" restrooms to the campus. The DailyCamera quotes student Bryce Abelson who identifies himself as a "gender queen" -- a person who is neither male nor female. Abelson tells the newspaper he is not comfortable in the men's bathroom and gets strange looks when he walks into women's facilities.
Jason Mattera is with the Young America's Foundation, a group that fights liberal bias and political correctness on college campuses. He says UC-Boulder is "flushing tax dollars down the toilet."
"Administrations at schools and these officials have absolutely lost every bit of sensibility, every bit of rationality," says Mattera. "They want to sleep with the 'goddess' of diversity and political correctness on a daily basis, and any way they can facilitate more politically correct activities on campus, they will do it." It is the "moral debauchery of higher education," he adds.
Task force members want signs in the new bathrooms to feature a "hybrid icon" with half of the figure wearing a dress and the other half wearing pants. The director of the campus Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center -- which features a nearby "all-gendered" bathroom -- tells DailyCamera it is all part of the education process.
"I would consider it an advocacy effort to make the campus more educated about transgender and gender-queer students," says Stephanie Wilenchek. "The task force isn't looking to take over the bathrooms. We just want folks to learn more."
But instead of affirming the destructive behavior of transgender students, Mattera says school officials need to find counseling for them. Abelson, he says, is a case in point.
"Bryce Abelson ... says that he doesn't consider himself a man[and] he is definitely not a woman; he is somewhere in between -- a gender queer," says Mattera. "And [he says] the school's current bathroom facilities discriminate against him because they don't have a separate bathroom for gender-queer people. That means he feels uncomfortable using the men's bathroom, and he gets kicked out of using the women's bathroom."
The university's Women's Studies Program recently held a symposium that discussed, among other things, "discrimination in sex-segregated facilities." One guest at that symposium -- an attorney with a New York legal group -- conducted training with CU directors that included how to break down sex segregation in restrooms.
