It can be difficult to stand before someone in authority and offer your opinion. It can especially be difficult when you are a high school student and speaking about something that is very dear to your heart.
Celeste Diest is a junior at the Lucia Mar Unified School District in Arroyo Grande and she found herself at the podium discussing concerns about the girls locker room at school. The particular concern was that a transgender student was participating, and they were in the locker room staring at the girls who were changing.
As she recounted this to the person in charge, she became emotional and started crying. Rather than being empathetic, the chairman simply told her to ‘wrap it up’ and completely invalidated all of the girl’s concerns.
She said: “Recently, I went into the women’s locker room to change for track practice. Where I saw at the end of my row a biological male watching not only myself but the other young women undress.”
Diest said that the situation was ‘beyond traumatizing’ and said that the trans-individual was already dressed and shouldn’t have been ‘in a locker room, let alone the women’s’.
She went on to say: “Adults like yourself make me and my peers feel like our own comfort was invalid, even though our privacy was and still is completely violated.”
The student then spoke about the chromosomal makeup of different people, saying: “males have XY chromosomes, females have XX chromosomes.” She said that it was ‘basic biology’
As she struggled to finish the sentence, the president of the school board, Colleen Martin interrupted her and told her to ‘please wrap it up’.
The student continued: “I just want to ask ‘What about us?’
“We cannot sit around and allow our rights to be given up to cater to an individual that is a man, who watches women undress and is stripping away female opportunity that once was fought for us.”
Her words didn’t seem to have much of an impact on the chairman, but it did have an impact on those in the audience. Some of them were even wearing T-shirts that read, ‘Save Girls Sports’.
You can see it happening for yourself in the following video: