Alexandra Brodsky takes the Alliance Defending Freedom to task in an editorial in the NY Times: Don't Use Girls as Props to Fight Trans Rights. Brodsky is a Skadden fellow at the National Women's Law Center.

Over the past year, the A.D.F. has filed lawsuits across the country challenging schools’ decisions to respect transgender students by letting them access single-sex facilities consistent with their gender identity. These policies, the right-wing group claims, actually threaten girls’ educations. Many of its arguments are similar to those made by a Virginia school board defending itself in a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a male student who was denied access to the boys’ restroom because he is transgender. The Supreme Court is still deciding whether to hear that case.

In the Minnesota lawsuit, Privacy Matters v. U.S. Department of Education, the A.D.F. attempts to tell a tale of gender-bending terror. Instead, the complaint reads, heartbreakingly, as the story of a transgender girl acting like any other girl — dancing in the locker room, expressing insecurities about her body — in the face of rejection by her peers.

A student described in the complaint would rather stop playing basketball than share a locker room with the transgender student, and the A.D.F. argues that her classmate’s presence violates her right to athletic opportunity. The suit, which uses male pronouns to refer to the transgender girl, treats one student’s prejudices as fact and her classmate’s identity as a threatening fantasy.

The focus on privacy marks a shift in anti-trans strategy. Earlier efforts, like North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which limited bathroom access, relied on a dangerous myth that prohibiting discrimination against transgender people would allow predatory men to enter women’s restrooms. That approach is giving way to a new focus on privacy — narrowly defined to include only non-transgender women and girls.

The claim depends on the belief that transgender girls are actually boys. The organization bringing the suit sees no problem in the girls’ locker room if there are no transgender girls present. But the fake-feminist privacy argument is apparently more tolerable to liberal minds — and perhaps more dangerous for that reason.

Brodsky finishes with

Our struggles against sexism and transphobia are not in tension but intertwined. Gender discrimination, whatever form it takes, should never stand in the way of a student’s opportunity to learn and thrive.