A teenage boy in California will be the first transsexual student in his state to play on a girls’ softball team at his school, after a controversial new law came into effect in January.
Patrick Cordova-Goff tried out for the softball team after a new Californian state law gave transsexual students the choice to join either girls’ or boys’ sports teams at school.
The 5’8″ seventeen-year-old male student, who wants to be a girl, is also part of the school’s cheerleading squad.
Parents
The controversial law, Assembly Bill 1266, also gives transsexual students the right to access bathrooms and changing rooms of the sex they want to assume.
During the passage of the bill parents, students, pro-family groups and politicians raised concerns that the new law could distort the “gender expectations” of children.
“Elementary and secondary students of California – our most impressionable, our most vulnerable – now may be subjected to some very difficult situations”, warned Senator Jim Nielsen last year at the time the bill was signed into law.
Uncomfortable
He added: “Think about the millions of California parents and students who at the least would be extraordinarily uncomfortable with what this bill would impose upon them”.
Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, said last year: “This radical bill warps the gender expectations of children by forcing all California public schools to permit biological boys in girls restrooms, showers, clubs and on girls sports teams and biological girls in boys restrooms, showers clubs and sports teams”.
In January a court ruled that a primary school in America acted unlawfully when it prevented a transsexual boy from using the girls’ toilets.
Discrimination
The highest court in the US state of Maine ruled that Orono school district breached the human rights of a boy known as Nicole, who was told he must use the staff, not female bathroom.
Last July a six-year-old transsexual boy in the US state of Colorado won the right to use the girls’ toilets at his school.
Coy Matthis’ parents claimed it was discrimination to disallow their son from using the bathroom of the sex he wants to assume, and took the school to a civil rights panel.