During a training seminar, a school district in Maryland instructed teachers that male students must be allowed to sleep with females on overnight trips. And teachers can’t tell parents. 


“So, many of you might be asking yourselves, ‘So I’m at an overnight field trip, and I have student who’s biologically a male, identifies as a female, and we’ve worked with that student and her family, and that student wants to sleep in the dorms, or whatever sleeping arrangements are, with the females.  They don’t want to sleep in a room by themselves; they want to sleep with the rest of the females. So what do we do?”

“And the answer is, they sleep with the females. That’s not the easy answer; it’s the right answer. And in some cases, it’s going to cause issues, because … the private information piece doesn’t allow you to share that with parents of all of the other campers. Right?”

The administrators leading the seminar go on to discuss how this is scientifically the right thing to do for students.


Recent studies indicate that the science is far from settled on childhood gender identity disorder.


The instructor acknowledges that parents and female students might have objections to a male in the female restroom, locker-room, or now even sharing the same bed. The solution they identify is to allow that student the “right to request somewhere else to change.”

There is a constitutional right to bodily privacy—to not be viewed unclothed by those of the opposite sex. This right has been upheld for children at school, employees at work, and even convicted felons in prison.

>> Omaha Public Schools Considering Controversial Bathroom and Locker Room Policy


It is now not just students’ rights at stake, but parent’s rights as well.


The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution “protects the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody and control of their children.” (See, e.g., Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 66 (2000)

The school district seems to be operating under the mistaken belief that President Obama’s guidelines and Title IX require them to treat sex as irrelevant to restrooms, showers, locker rooms and overnight field trips.


But the courts have found the opposite: student bodily privacy is a constitutional right that schools have a responsibility to protect.

Nate Grasz

Nate Grasz

Policy Director
Nate is the Policy Director at Nebraska Family Alliance and host of the Capitol Report program.