How Gender Ideology Threatens Women’s Privacy

We live in an age in which not everyone will say what a woman is (or isn’t). If someone does speak out, they could face significant backlash. Many already have.

In 2015, a Michigan woman’s gym membership was revoked because she spoke out against a man being in the women’s locker room. When she went to the front desk, she was told it was the gym’s policy to allow people to use the locker room that suited their chosen “gender identity,” not their sex. The woman raised this to corporate, which confirmed the policy. The gym then revoked her membership after she told other women that a man had been in the women’s locker room.

Policy did not protect women’s privacy or dignity. It didn’t even inform women that this was a possibility. Instead, a man was allowed to enter a women’s locker room, and a woman was told she could wait until he was finished if she felt uncomfortable.

Rather than being heard and protected, many women are silenced and pushed aside when men enter their spaces under the guise of gender ideology.

How Does Gender Ideology Impact Women’s Privacy?

Gender ideology is often depicted as freeing to society, casting off boundaries, definitions, and restraints. Without objective meanings of words like “woman,” however, laws designed to protect women and advance their opportunities ring hollow. What is allegedly called progress is, in fact, a drastic setback.

Private spaces are an indispensable aspect of a woman’s life, but there have been setbacks to this idea due to gender ideology. Having spaces designated for women is a crucial component of women’s privacy. Sex-designated spaces allow women to let their guards down without substantial risks to their safety or dignity. Now, women’s spaces are no longer private, and sometimes not even safe, because men are allowed to enter. This can affect more areas of life than you might think.

Bathrooms

Many school districts treat girls’ discomfort with males being in their bathrooms as something to be worked around, not a concern that should be respected. Gender ideology has been prioritized over the privacy of the female students in these districts.

• In 2015, a high school district in Illinois opened school restrooms to the opposite sex, and then the girls’ locker room to a boy, after the U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration threatened its federal funding. Alliance Defending Freedom and the Thomas More Law Society filed a lawsuit on behalf of 51 families to stand up against this violation of the privacy, safety, and dignity of the students.
• More recently, in Maryland, there has not been such respect for women’s privacy. Various school districts have enacted policies to allow boys in girls’ restrooms. Girls who feel uncomfortable are told to use alternatives, such as a single-stall restroom.

However, some states have been proactive about maintaining girls’ privacy.

• Idaho enacted a law protecting the privacy of K-12 students by designating bathrooms, locker rooms, and overnight accommodations according to sex. When activists challenged this law, an appellate court ruled to uphold it, affirming Idaho’s authority to protect the privacy and dignity of students.
• A Florida school board faced a similar situation and prevailed. After the school board designated bathrooms according to sex, a female student who identified as male challenged this decision. Thankfully, an appellate court affirmed that designating school bathrooms according to sex is both constitutional and aligns with Title IX.

As these situations demonstrate, whether or not women’s privacy is respected frequently rests on whether state and local officials have the courage to stand up for what’s right.

Locker Rooms

Adaleia Cross was in middle school when a boy joined her all-girls track and field team, changing her experience for the worse. Not only did he take her opportunity to compete in the championship meet. He also sexually harassed her in the locker room.

Having a boy in the locker room didn’t affect just Adaleia. Many of the girls on the team stopped using the locker room. Instead, they ended up changing in bathroom stalls or wearing their practice clothes all day to preserve their privacy. Being forced to surrender your space to preserve your privacy and dignity is no solution.

Riley Gaines was a collegiate swimmer who has since become well known for speaking up for women’s sports and spaces. She experienced firsthand not only what it was like to compete against and lose to a male athlete. She was also forced to share a locker room with him. No one asked the women whether they were okay with undressing in front of a man. Privacy and dignity were blown out of the water.

These are not isolated events. Multiple states filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration’s directive that would have forced students in public schools to share locker rooms and rooms on overnight school trips with members of the opposite sex. A federal court blocked the directive, preserving the ability of schools to protect the privacy, safety, and dignity of their students.

Women’s Shelters

Survivors of sex trafficking and domestic abuse can experience a safe space in shelters, but when gender ideology prevails, that refuge is threatened.

In Anchorage, Alaska, officials tried to force Downtown Hope Center to allow men who identify as women to sleep alongside women. The center serves everyone, but it only lets women stay overnight to provide a safe space for women escaping sex trafficking or abusive situations. These women should not be forced to sleep in the same room as a man.

Yet this possibility became real when a man who identified as a woman came to the women’s shelter seeking to stay there overnight. He was inebriated and injured. Downtown Hope Center referred the man to a hospital and paid for his taxi ride, serving him while maintaining the safety of the women inside.

Downtown Hope Center challenged the city’s attempt to force it to allow men to stay overnight in two different lawsuits and prevailed both times.

Women’s Prisons

Minnesota officials adopted a policy that allows men who identify as women to be housed in women’s prisons. One worker of the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee, who taught classes to the female inmates, spoke up when she was supposed to teach a male inmate. Rather than her concern being heard and respected, she was made to feel like she would be punished if she did not teach the male inmate. She eventually resigned because she could not be silent about the danger of men in women’s prisons. If Minnesota truly wanted to help female inmates, the state would not threaten their privacy and safety by allowing men into their intimate spaces.

Washington has allowed men into women’s prisons as well, and the consequences are catastrophic. A man who identifies as a woman was in a men’s prison for years before transferring to the women’s prison. There, the inmate engaged in inappropriate conduct with a female cellmate and was transferred back to the men’s prison. The inmate is challenging the transfer back, and the case has reached Washington state’s Supreme Court.

In California, there was an even more disturbing example. A man housed in a women’s prison was accused of raping two female inmates. He, too, was moved back to the men’s prison. A lawsuit on behalf of female inmates is ongoing.

Women should not have to be subject to these experiences before their privacy and safety are respected.

Room Assignments

In K-12 education in some states, girls on school trips are assigned to share hotel rooms with boys on overnight school-sponsored trips because their school ignored common sense without informing them or their parents.

In Jefferson County, Colorado, Joe and Serena Wailes’ 11-year-old daughter went on a field trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., a trip she had been looking forward to for a long time. As she readied for bed on the first night, the student she was supposed to share a bed with told her that he was a boy who identified as a girl. Neither she nor her parents had been informed of this possibility. In fact, her parents were told that boys and girls would be roomed on separate floors. No one mentioned that rooms could be assigned based on “gender identity” rather than sex, per district policy.

The prospect of sharing a room, and possibly a bed, with a boy made the Wailes’s daughter uncomfortable. She called her mom, who had thankfully gone on the trip, though not as a chaperone. At first, school officials told the daughter to just change to a different bed in the same room. But that didn’t address the fact that she would still be sleeping in the same room as a boy.

Her mother continued to work with school officials, and a different rooming situation was eventually made. These students should not have been put in that awkward position. And parents should have notice—and the ability to opt their child out—of opposite-sex rooming assignments.

Beyond overnight trips, students have even been threatened to share college dorm rooms with members of the opposite sex. A Biden administration rule change would not only have opened up residence halls to have co-ed floors. It would have required schools to place men and women together as roommates and allow them to use communal bathrooms and showers. ADF filed a lawsuit on behalf of College of the Ozarks challenging this rule. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Women’s privacy is worth protecting

Women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and prisons exist because sex differences are real and because women’s safety and dignity depend on that reality being respected, not redefined. Being physically observed by or in close proximity to a male in spaces meant for women is a violation of women’s privacy and safety.

Protecting women’s privacy isn’t a favor extended to women. It’s a recognition of something true about the world, and truth should never require an apology. When the truth is rejected, the harm is real, widespread, and devastating, and it leaves women to endure the consequences.

Women deserve better. They shouldn’t be silenced or pushed aside. They should be heard, respected, and protected.