http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/saunders/article/Gender-identity-bill-carries-risk-of-personal-pain-4676062.php?t=2932da4c3717300f33Gender identity bill carries risk of personal pain
By Debra J. Saunders
9:31 AM
Assembly member Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, has written a bill that would require California public schools to allow students to choose which bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams match their gender identity. Both the Assembly and state Senate have passed Assembly Bill 1266. It now sits on the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown. If the governor allows the bill to become law, then public school administrators won't be able to assign transgender third-graders to use a separate bathroom or play on the team of their biological gender — even if their motive is to protect a vulnerable child.
"Separate but equal," Ammiano's senior legislative assistant Wendy Hill told me, already is against the law. Indeed, the new bill doesn't really change anything, it "just clarifies what current law already states."
Ammiano never has been known for his tolerance toward dissenting opinions. When the late KGO talk show host Pete Wilson voiced his discomfort about a child born to be raised by a gay San Francisco supervisor and a lesbian partner in 2006, Ammiano, then a San Francisco supervisor, demanded that Wilson resign. (Wilson had said, "A child is not an experiment." Ammiano accused Wilson of homophobia and "trying to dehumanize a week-old baby.")
So it's no surprise that he'd be pushing for a bill that sanctifies the sensitivity of transgender children, while steamrolling the feelings of girls who may not want biological boys in their locker rooms or on their soccer teams. (No worries, Hill told me, those girls can ask for special accommodations if they don't want to share facilities with a biologically male girl.)
