This sounds too absurd to be true. Yet, it is true: the federal government concluded that a school district just outside of Chicago violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender, because they won’t allow a male high school student take showers with his female classmates.

Let’s get this straight: the school district already went way beyond what is reasonable to accommodate the mentally ill boy, who thinks that he’s a girl trapped in a boy’s body. They changed his name and gender on all school records, and refer to him as a “she”. They allowed him to use the girl’s bathrooms, and play on girls’ sports teams. They even agreed to let him change in the girls’ locker rooms. That is not enough, however: he wants the girls to see him changing.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The student, who has identified as a girl for a number of years, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in late 2013 after she was denied unrestricted access to the girls’ locker room. District and federal officials negotiated for months, and a solution appeared imminent as recently as last week, when the district put up privacy curtains in the locker room.

But talks stalled after school officials said the student would be required to use the private area, as opposed to offering her a choice to use it. Although the student said she intends to use the private area or a locker room bathroom stall to change, the stipulation constitutes “blatant discrimination,” said John Knight, director of the LGBT and AIDS Project at ACLU of Illinois, which is representing the student.

“It’s not voluntary, it’s mandatory for her,” Knight said. “It’s one thing to say to all the girls, ‘You can choose if you want some extra privacy,’ but it’s another thing to say, ‘You, and you alone, must use them.’ That sends a pretty strong signal to her that she’s not accepted and the district does not see her as girl.”

Superintendent Daniel Cates’s comments are an island of common sense in the federal sea of insanity:

“The students in our schools are teenagers, not adults, and one’s gender is not the same as one’s anatomy,” Cates said in a statement. “Boys and girls are in separate locker rooms — where there are open changing areas and open shower facilities — for a reason.”

It is common sense, isn’t it — that teenage girls should not be forced to shower with teenage boys? The very fact that we have to state this self-evident truth, is absurd. But wait, it gets more ridiculous:

The student, whom the ACLU said does not want to be identified for privacy reasons, said in a statement that the federal ruling “makes clear that what my school did was wrong.”

The boy, who insists that it is his right to be seen naked by his naked girl classmates, is worried about his privacy! You really can’t make this stuff up.

I know lots of people will get angry about this, as they should. They will call their representatives, and their senators. They will write letters to the editor, and maybe even lobby to get rid of the law. Unfortunately, none of these good and proper actions will stop the public schools’ relentless march toward total depravity. Eventually, the parents will acclimate to the new reality where their teenage daughters are forced to take showers with teenage boys. Furthermore, anyone challenging the new normal will be referred to as an intolerant bigot.

The so-called “public” government-run school system is rotten to the core. It is built on the false foundations of collectivism and obedience to the state, and is antithetical to the core American values of individualism, liberty, and virtuousness. It cannot be salvaged or reformed, it must be scrapped and replaced with a capitalist, free-market system. I pray and hope that someday, we will have such a system. Until then, my wife and I will continue to homeschool our kids.