Conclusion
This case decision adds to the ongoing social debate of whether state and federal legislatures should resolve these “collision of rights” cases on behalf of all citizens? Alternatively, should Americans leave these disputes to the courts to fashion decisions from statutes written before the words “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender” entered the American consciousness? This Iowa case decision, from America’s heartland, gives the reader a “bird’s-eye view” of the competition of those asserted rights on each side of the tug of war rope.
This was a relatively straightforward case: a mature adult biological woman transitioning to the male gender, earnestly and in good faith, albeit not in the most genteel and refined workplace context, a correctional institute. Consider the more challenging cases coming, such as a biological male teenager with male sex organs still intact, wishing to transition to the female gender with a doctor’s or psychologist’s orders to shower in the girl’s locker room at high school following the daily PE class.
Or consider perhaps the most difficult case: grief-stricken parents of an eight-year-old born, as almost two percent of babies in America are born each year, with BOTH female and male sex organs. Assume that doctors have advised the parents to choose one sex or the other, as is often the case at that age, and subject their child momentarily to a series of expensive and emotionally wrenching transgender reassignment surgeries. And then third parties in the child’s community (churches, political figures, neighbors, near family relations, school administrators, insurance companies, lawyers and the news media) enter this complex, delicate and intimate discussion to seek to stop the parents and their doctors by variously asserting religious, ethical, moral, contract, legal and/or medical objections.
How much would you want to be that Judge, or those parents, or that child? What would you do—from any one of those different perspectives?