Bathrooms with a view: Cutting windows into student restrooms is a new level of weird
www.yorkdispatch.com
These adults want to make it easier for other people to watch your children while they’re in the bathroom. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.

South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.

For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.

After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.

Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
      21·
      1 hour ago

      I’m betting there is some sort of legal prohibition against creating a mixed-gender restroom, and the way they are getting around it is by declaring only the toilet stalls to be restrooms. With the window into the area of the sinks, that area is a public space, and can’t legally be considered part of the restroom.

      So long as the toilets are in actual rooms with floor to ceiling walls and actual doors (not the bullshit stalls we typically use in the US), and those rooms don’t have windows, this isn’t as terrible an idea as it initially seems.

      • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
        3·
        54 minutes ago

        They have already created gender neutral restrooms, according to the article these windows are not in those.

        There’s 2 stalls visible in the picture. The walls are not floor to ceiling, the doors have larger gaps above and though it isn’t visible, I expect also a gap below. It’s not clear if there are vertical visibility slits on the sides of the doors. But they’re clearly just stalls really.

        But it doesn’t really matter how the stalls are, the way that we know that this is targeted spite and bullying, is that windows are being cut only in a specific subset of the restrooms. They’re trying to shame and intimidate the kids that are in those restrooms.

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
          11·
          34 minutes ago

          Possible.

          It’s also possible that the stalls do provide an adequate degree of privacy, coming very close to the floor, and sufficiently high enough to prevent people from seeing inside. They certainly don’t look like the stalls my school used.

          Frankly, if their intention is to shame and intimidated, I’m rather surprised they are going to this much effort, when they could just not do anything at all.

          Do we know that the other, gender-neutral restrooms are similarly communal? Is it possible that they are single-user facilities with sinks, and need only appropriate signage to make them inclusive?