I am sorry but how does this protect any student or adult … it also includes higher education.  Notice this part … About 3% of high school students identify as transgender, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  That is in a country of 337 million people. 

This is only a hate bill based on the absurd idea that trans women want to assault girls.  Notice it is always trans girls / women they talk about never trans boys or trans men.  It is a made up problem that never happened so they have to destroy a small minority of people’s lives to prove a point of their bigotry.  I am so sick of this posturing on the part of republicans trying to do to trans what they couldn’t do to the gays 30 years ago.  It is the same tactics and hate they promote.  If you want to know the real cost listen to the trans students who quit school because they had nowhere to go to the bathroom, or the trans students who were given approved bathrooms so far from their classes that they missed some and got bad marks for simply needing to pee before the class started.  These bills have real world consequences for young people in every state.  It is not just the bathroom issue but it makes a trans person a target even if there is a “trans bathroom” assigned.  It means any student using it is outing themselves to the ones that want to target them for abuse.   

Again this solves no problem but does promote hate and bigotry … and it is driven by religious bigotry because of the fundamentalist belief that their god created them male and female only.  They are demanding we run our society, or 2024 understands on the book written by religious leaders 2,500 years ago.  Think about it, these people had no idea of everything we take for granted today, yet the fundamentalist who demand we ;deny rights to trans people do it based on that book of people who did not even understand germs!  These bills are designed to promote a religion and a religious view of life / morality in the public life.   I am an old gay man, this still affects me.  Because bigotry against one group’s rights is bigotry against all people’s rights!  If these people get the right to exclude trans people from bathrooms what is next?  Gay people on the same idea that we are a threat?  Or hell watch about the old segregation idea that blacks are a threat to whites in bathrooms?  See this is the same playbook.  This is not different from black people shouldn’t be in white people’s bathrooms.   Hugs

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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a bill into law banning transgender students from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that match up with their gender identity.

The law requires people at Ohio K-12 schools and universities use the restroom that aligns with their gender assigned at birth. It also bans students from sharing overnight accommodations with people of the opposite sex from their assigned sex at birth at K-12 schools.  

This does not prevent a school from having single-occupancy facilities and does not apply to someone helping a person with a disability or a child younger than 10 years old being assisted by a parent, guardian or family member. 

The law will take effect 90 days after DeWine signed the bill.

A lawsuit is expected to be filed against this. The Ohio Capital Journal interviewed a Cleveland attorney over the summer about potential legal challenges with the bill, such as who would police such a policy? 

Several transgender Ohioans, allies and educators called on DeWine to veto the bill. The Ohio Capital Journal recently talked to a family who plans on moving out of Ohio because of anti-transgender legislation at the Statehouse. 

The bathroom ban (House Bill 183) was added to a bill that revises College Credit Plus (Senate Bill 104) in the eleventh hour of a House Session at the end of June before the lawmakers went on an extended break.

The Ohio Senate concurred with the changes made to S.B. 104 during their first session back from break. 

State Reps. Beth Lear, R-Galena, and Adam Bird, R-New Richmond, introduced H.B. 183. State Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, introduced S.B. 104. 

About 3% of high school students identify as transgender, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The American Medical Association officially opposes policies preventing transgender individuals from accessing basic human services and public facilities consistent with gender identity.

Slightly more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth in Ohio considered suicide in 2022, according to the Trevor Project. 

About a third of LGBTQ+ students were prevented from using the bathroom that aligned with their gender and slightly more than a quarter were stopped from using the locker room that aligned with their gender, according to Ohio’s 2021 state snapshot by GLSEN, which examines the school experiences of LGBTQ middle and high school students.

Forty-two percent of transgender and nonbinary students were unable to use the bathroom that aligned with their gender and 36% couldn’t use the locker room that aligned with their gender, according to the Ohio GLSEN report. 

Transgender youth who can’t use the bathroom that aligns with their gender are at a greater risk of sexual violence, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Pediatrics.  

Other states with transgender bathroom bans

Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Florida, and Utah have laws that ban transgender people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity in schools. 

Florida, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Tennessee’s laws have all been challenged. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit blocked Idaho’s law last year.  

North Carolina made history in 2016 by becoming the first state to ban bathroom access to transgender people. The law was quickly appealed in 2017 and settled in federal court in 2019, but the state ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars as the NBA All-Star Game and NCAA events were moved out of state. 

Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on X.