In late June of 2016, the Pico family toured the Vatican. Lots of history, tradition and great art, about which thousands and thousands of people have previously written; it’s a subject on which I have little more to contribute.

But there is one very unexpected quirk I saw, just before we left, that addresses a problem for today. Near a public cafeteria were the public restrooms. Entering the men’s room, I noticed the typical urinals along one wall, some in use, and a middle-aged female janitor cleaning, while the restroom was in use. Well, that’s pretty European, I thought.

Then I got to the stalls. Unlike what we see in the United States, the stalls in that men’s room had walls and doors which were essentially floor-to-ceiling, providing complete privacy. And that’s the solution to the stupidity we are seeing in the United States these days.

Did the Supreme Court settle the question of transgender bathrooms in KY? Maybe not.

By Karla Ward | June 30, 2021 | 6:41 AM | Updated: 6:57 AM EDT

While groups supporting transgender rights are celebrating a U.S. Supreme Court decision on bathrooms for transgender students, the polarizing issue might not be resolved in Kentucky.

On Monday, the Supreme Court said it would not hear the appeal of the Gloucester County, Va., school board in a case that began six years ago, when Gavin Grimm, a transgender high school student, then 15, filed a lawsuit because of a policy that prohibited Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom.

Lower courts ruled that the school board’s policy requiring students to use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex or go to a private bathroom violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating based on sex. By choosing not to hear the case, the Supreme Court left in place the rulings in the student’s favor.

There’s more at the original.

The debate on which public restrooms ‘transgender'^[1]Yes, you may infer from my placing the word ‘transgender’ in single quotation marks that I do not accept the cockamamie notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. people may use breaks down into two main sides: those who believe, as I do, that biological sex is unchangeable and that people are the sex they are born, and those who accept ‘transgenderism’ as a reality and believe that people can, legitimately, be a different gender than that from their biological sex. The latter group seem to believe that it injures the ‘transgendered’ by providing societal disapproval of their choices.

Public restrooms provide some privacy, though it isn’t complete. There are concerns that one sex can use our current public restroom set-ups to voyeur on another, as well as real safety concerns if we have both biological sexes, regardless of how they ‘identify,’ using the same facilities.

“You probably will see this again,” said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation.

Cothran said having a statewide policy would be a matter of “convenience” for school districts.

“There’s a lot of districts who would rather not have to deal with it and have some guidelines that they can all follow,” he said. “It settles the matter.”

If students are transgender, “I don’t know why anyone knows about it in the first place unless you’re going to make a big deal about it,” he said. “Why are we doing that?”

Uhhh, let’s get real here: in schools, everybody knows if someone is ‘transgender.’ There are no secrets in schools.

“The other issue is safety,” he said. “I don’t know in what world sending a biological girl into a boys’ bathroom improves safety or vice versa.”

He said unisex bathrooms could be made available to students who are transgender.

But (Jackie McGranahan, policy strategist for the ACLU of Kentucky,) said policies like that are “degrading and stigmatizing” to transgender students.

“Everyone has the right to be themselves at school,” she said.

While I do not believe that the government should be somehow approving of the claims of the ‘transgendered’ that they are a different sex than what they are, some states have done just that. More, the federal government has done the same, allowing people to specify their ‘current gender’ identity on their federal government issued passports.^[2]I would guess that there are certain countries to which a ‘transgendered’ American might not wish to go

In Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia, 590 U. S. ____ (2020), the Supreme Court held that an employer who fires an individual merely for being homosexual or ‘transgender’ violates Title VII. Unless we have a massive increase in societal intelligence, the force of law is going to come down on the side of ‘transgender’ rights, including in the public schools.

Public schools have public restrooms, and while virtually all of them were designed for a time when we had no public difference on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ that public difference has emerged. The solution to our safety concerns was addressed in the men’s room in the Vatican: build all new public restrooms to that privacy standard, and retrofit existing public restrooms to meet such.

Will such provide perfect safety and privacy? No, because junior high and high school students are, by definition, immature, and some are [insert plural slang term for the rectum here], so nothing can be guaranteed. But it can provide privacy for people who do not wish to be observed by persons of the opposite, or even same, sex, and it can provide safety for girls when biological males are in the facilities. It deals with the concerns at hand, as much as physical facilities can deal with them.