WATERLOO, Illinois (LifeSiteNews) — Students at an Illinois high school are speaking out after being threatened with disciplinary action for protesting the school’s policy allowing transgender-identifying students to use opposite-sex bathrooms, The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) reported.
According to the report, roughly 150 students attending Waterloo High School in southwest Illinois protested the school’s policy by lining up outside the school nurse’s bathroom on March 17. The students decided to form the line in response to being advised to use a single-stall bathroom if sharing facilities with opposite-sex students made them uncomfortable.
Now those students are facing punishments from the school administration, including being marked tardy from class and even potential disciplinary actions for alleged “harassment.”
“On Friday, around 150 students, including myself, stood up for our rights and beliefs,” Waterloo High School senior Anna Demers told the DCNF.
“We were told to use a single stall restroom in the nurse’s office if we were uncomfortable with persons of the opposite genitalia in our restrooms,” she said. “We all stood in line, to use the restroom, and to make a statement.”
RELATED: Florida schools allowed to keep gender-confused students out of opposite-sex bathrooms
Demers said that she and her fellow students protesting the rule were “verbally harassed” while they carried out their protest and were “called homophobic and transphobic.”
“That just is not true. I am not scared nor do I hold any hatred,” she said. “Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less what they do with their body and what they identify as, but when it reaches my security, privacy and sanctity [sic], that is where it crosses the line.”
Demers said the protest was largely peaceful, though a few students became rowdy, and that previous attempts to “stress our safety concerns” with administrators in advance of the protest had fallen on deaf ears.
The school’s administration responded to the protest by cracking down on the students, DCNF reported.
In a March 17 email obtained by the outlet, Waterloo High School superintendent Brian Charron said the students would face disciplinary action for their prior protest and any future actions.
“We want all parents and students to understand that we will not tolerate another significant disruption in school,” Charron wrote, explaining that the school’s policy, which dates to 2017, conforms with state and federal law.
“Students who participated in this disruption today were marked tardy or absent from class,” Charron wrote, warning that future actions would be met with disciplinary action “for attempting to cause a disruption in school.”
In addition, Charron warned that “[t]o the extent we determine that the nurse’s office bathroom line was a form of harassment, students will be disciplined for their participation in the harassment.”
Reacting to the warnings, Waterloo High School senior Eric Williams shared that, in his view, punishment from the school administration “is a violation of our first constitutional right to assemble peacefully and organized [sic].”
“We were doing only what the administration told us to do and we get punished for following it. That is unfair, and with everything else I’ve stated, I’m quite frankly disappointed with our board and administration with how they handled this,” Williams said.
He told the outlet that Charron’s email “only solidified that the line, and any other kind of petition or protest, is going to be silenced.”
Demers told DCNF that the school’s policy and disciplinary actions against students who push back against it impede her ability to benefit from her high school experience.
“I want an education, not harassment charges for worrying about the safety of myself and others,” Demers said. “This isn’t a gender issue. I am friends with and love many people in the LGBTQIA+ community. This is a safety issue for people on all sides of this issue.”
According to another email obtained by DCNF from the high school’s superintendent, the school board held a meeting Monday to address the students’ concerns and troubleshoot on whether existing bathrooms can be renovated to provide more privacy or be overhauled into gender-neutral spaces.
Demers told DCNF the students will keep protesting until a resolution is reached.
Meanwhile, the Illinois students aren’t the only ones facing disciplinary action for protesting the breakdown of such fundamental social barriers as gender-specific bathrooms.
As LifeSiteNews previously reported, Canadian high schooler Josh Alexander was served with a trespass notice, permanently suspended from his Catholic school, and arrested after protesting a similar policy. According to Alexander’s lawyer, the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board said the suspension of the teen was justified because Alexander’s protests amounted to the “bullying of trans students.”
Alexander told LifeSiteNews’ John-Henry Westen he felt “a responsibility to stand up to this kind of nonsense,” and urged others who believe similarly to not be afraid to do the same.
“Just keep pushing, keep fighting. Don’t give up,” he said. “Trust in God, and He’ll have your back.”
In recent months, spurred in large part by the shocking report of a skirt-wearing male student who raped a girl in a Loudoun County, Virginia school bathroom in October 2021, grassroots organizations and lawmakers have pushed to ensure that vulnerable places like bathrooms and locker-rooms are kept sex-specific.
Last week, the governors of Arkansas and Iowa signed legislation banning people from using bathrooms intended for the opposite sex.
In a statement announcing the governor’s decision to sign the law, a spokeswoman for Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders affirmed the law is meant to push back “the radical left’s woke agenda” and work toward “protecting and educating our kids.”
“Arkansas isn’t going to rewrite the rules of biology just to please a handful of far-left advocates,” the statement read.