Transgender rights are still under attack across the country despite North Carolina’s repeal of its so-called “bathroom bill,” but New York City is sticking firm to the right side of history. The city’s Department of Education chancellor Carmen Farina has announced that all the city’s public schools are required have at least one gender-neutral restroom by January 2018. The new policy aims to protect the privacy and physical safety of trans students, as well as students with medical conditions and disabilities, according to AP.
NYC has been waving the flag for trans rights since LGBTQ discrimination — including anti-trans bathroom bills — became a nationwide debate. In March last year, the same month North Carolina passed HB2, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new regulation that granted people access to public restroom facilities that correspond with their gender identity. That mandate gave the city’s approximately 25,000 trans or gender-nonconforming residents access to their facility of choice at all of NYC’s city-owned buildings. “New York City is the birthplace of the fight for LGBT rights, and we continue to lead in that fight so every New Yorker can live with dignity,” de Blasio said at the time.
We’re living in a very different time than we were last March, but the new regulation is an important reminder that the fight for LGBTQ rights doesn’t start and stop in the White House. Nor does the debate about “bathroom bills” start and stop at bathrooms. As teen activist Hunter Schafer explained recently, “[the topic] touches the founding tenets of our country’s social structure, and the ideas of gender within which our society functions. Trans youth and activists are slowly but surely breaking down the social binary through our own empowerment, thanks in part to the conversations created by our oppression.” Hopefully the NYC initiative can make the conversation a little louder.
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Text Hannah Ongley