It’s Discriminatory to Request Transgender Students Change Clothes Behind ‘Privacy Curtains’ in Locker Room, Illinois Rules

An Illinois government board has told a Chicago-area school district it cannot force transgender students to dress and undress behind a privacy curtain. 

Lake Park Community High School District 108 in Roselle, Ill., had allowed transgender students to change clothes in the locker room that corresponds to their gender identity, provided they did so behind a curtain for privacy. 

But earlier this month the Illinois Human Rights Commission ruled that the practice denied transgender students “full and equal access” to the locker room, the Chicago Tribune reported. The policy was discriminatory, the commission said. 

The commission’s ruling means, for example, that a school cannot force a biological boy to change clothes behind a privacy curtain in a girls’ locker room.   

The Lake Park student, a biological female who identifies as male, filed the complaint in 2016 and has graduated, the newspaper reported. 

“[Mandating] that the [student] use a privacy curtain when changing clothes in the boys’ locker room is an adverse act and subjects him to different terms and conditions than similarly situated non-transgender males,” the commission said in its order.

Even before the commission’s ruling, the district had reversed its policy to permit transgender students to dress and undress…