Obama's Transgender Bathroom Guidance Totalitarianism

From USA Today's "Q & A" on the administration's "transgender bathroom guidance":

Q: What other federal rules govern the treatment of transgender students?

A: The guidance released Friday also addressed other issues and wrapped up a number of less formal interpretations that the Department of Education has made about transgender students. For example:

• Teachers and staff cannot use a transgender student's birth name or pronoun, and school records must reflect the student's chosen name and gender identity. The Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1972 gives parents the right to challenge inaccurate records.

• Schools with sex-segregated accommodations on overnight field trips must allow transgender students to sleep with students of their chosen gender. Like bathrooms, schools can offer single-occupancy sleeping rooms, but they may not require transgender students to use them unless all students have access to them.

• Athletic teams are allowed to segregate by sex — especially for contact sports — as long as they provide equal opportunities for both sexes. The guidance allows for discrimination based on standards of fair play, but those standards cannot "rely on overly broad generalizations or stereotypes" about transgender students, or be based solely on teammates being uncomfortable with their participation.

• School-sponsored extracurricular activities and social events — such as yearbook photos, school dances and graduation ceremonies — must allow transgender students to dress and participate according to their gender identity.

And see Laurie Higgins, at the Illinois Family Institute, "Emperor Obama Mandates Co-Ed Restrooms - and More":

As I have written ad nauseum, this issue is not centrally about restrooms. It is centrally about the reality and meaning of sex differences, which the left seeks to eradicate. (Ironically, when homosexuals claim they are attracted only to persons of the same sex, they affirm and emphasize the reality of sexual differentiation. The left, however, is rarely constrained by foolish inconsistency.)

The left’s disbelief in the twoness of the sexes defies objective reality. The left’s belief that subjective feelings about objective maleness or femaleness must trump objective maleness and femaleness in every context from potties to pronouns is a philosophical, political, moral, and theological assumption—not an objective fact. And it’s certainly not true.

This, my friends, is something wicked.