Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee suggested earlier this year that boys could abuse transgender policies in schools for voyeurism in girls’ bathrooms — but a new investigation by Media Matters’ Rachel Percelay found this just isn’t happening.
The policies let trans students, who identify with a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth, use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.
“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” Huckabee said in a video resurfaced on YouTube over the weekend by World Net Daily, according to a report by BuzzFeed’s Megan Apper and Andrew Kaczynski. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
Media Matters’ investigation asked 17 school districts, which collectively represent more than 600,000 students, in 12 states that protect trans people if they’ve had any major problems or inappropriate behavior. School officials reported no issues, not even problems with students pretending to be trans, even in states with policies going as far back as 1993.
The responses read something like this email from Des Moines, Iowa, Public Schools: “When it comes to transgender students and our school district’s practice of making sure we serve students according to their individual gender identity, we have had no reported incidents of any student abusing our policies or taking advantage of them in any way that would be inappropriate or harassing. At this time, we have no examples to support such criticism.”
This matches the results of a previous investigation by Media Matters’ Carlos Maza, in which experts said, again, that there have been no issues with inappropriate behavior as a result of trans-friendly laws:
Based on these investigations’ results, it seems like ideas of voyeurism only exist in the political criticisms of trans-friendly policies, but not the reality of how such policies are implemented.
