When a progressive media watchdog wanted to counter the hysteria of conservative pundits alarmed that transgender public school students in California can use the restroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity, it turned to the largest school districts in the state. Among them was the Garden Grove Unified School District, whose response corresponded with that of officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and Riverside.
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Like their counterparts in those cities, officials with the Garden Grove district, the 11th largest in the state, reported to Media Matters for America no problems with transgenders in restrooms in the month since Gov. Jerry Brown signed the gender-equality law.
Garden Grove Unified School District
The Orange County-based Garden Grove Unified School District enrolled nearly 48,000 students in the 2011-2012 school year, making it the 11th-largest in the state.
Implementation of the School Success and Opportunity Act is proceeding apace in the district, spokeswoman Amy Stevens told Equality Matters.
“We are compliant with the law and have had no incidences,” Stevens reported.
Media Matters explained it felt compelled to poll California school districts after right-wing media figures like Bill O-Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin suggested implementation of the law would cause anarchy, madness and restroom shenanigans.
One of the most laughable claims was that non-transgender students would sneak into the restrooms of the opposite sex to sneak peaks and then justify the peeping by explaining they'd been momentarily overcome by transgender feelings.
A month in, there has been no such report of that happening in California. But thanks for the idea, Fox News talking heads!
A right-wing coalition aims to overturn the law in a November referendum, but an initial signature count suggests they won't have collected enough signatures to make the ballot by a Feb. 24 deadline.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.