Hey, Illinois, girls matter!

I’m looking at you, Governor Pritzker and Rahm Emanuel

March 18, 2025

On March 17, it was announced that the US Department of Health and Human Services has found that the state of Maine is in violation of federal law for allowing male athletes to participate in sports designed for women and girls:

In a statement, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it had given the Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals' Association and Greely High School in Cumberland, Maine, 10 days to resolve the alleged violation or it would refer the matter to the Department of Justice.

So that’s great news! But this post isn’t about that.

On March 15, the feminist magazine Reduxx published a story about a civil rights complaint a mother has filed against Illinois School District 109 after school administrators forced her 13-year-old daughter, and an entire class of female students, to undress in front of a male student in a school locker room. According to Reduxx:

Speaking during a meeting of the Deerfield School District 109 School Board on Thursday, Nicole Georgas revealed that on February 5, her daughter came home “frightened” and “upset” after finding a male student in the girls’ bathroom at school. Concerned, Georgas contacted the administration, and was told that under direction from their legal counsel, that if the student identifies as female, they are free to use any of the sex-segregated facilities as they so choose.

Only a few days later, “the situation went from bad to worse,” as according to Georgas, the male student was then present in the girls’ locker rooms for their Physical Education (PE) class. The girls, unwilling to have their privacy violated even further, collectively refused to undress in front of him. The following day, Assistant Principal Cathy Van Treese hauled the girls into her office and questioned them, before escorting them to their locker room and forcing them to change into their uniforms with the boy present. Van Treese was accompanied by Assistant Superintendent Joanna Ford and Director for Student Services Ginger Logemann. The monitoring to ensure compliance allegedly happened “all week,” Georgas explained to the district.

“My daughter refused to take part in having her privacy violated. How dare they. She ran out and called me for help,” she added. The solution presented by the school was for Georgas’s daughter to simply swap into a new PE class, which was flatly refused.

…

As such, Georgas revealed that she had filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice that has now been referred to the Department of Education, along with a federal complaint directly to the district in order to protect her daughter and other students. At the time of the executive order, the school district declared that they were “committed to providing a safe, inclusive, and high-quality education for all students.”

Video of Georgas testifying before the District can be found here (followed by the testimony of a woman who calls herself Charlie, whose pronouns are they/he, thank you very much).

The final testimony of the day was delivered by a woman named Tina Nelson (“she/her pronouns”).

As Genevieve Gluck explains, in her testimony, Nelson complained that Georgas and other mothers who objected to their daughters being forced to disrobe in front of a male student are “petty women” who “push the white supremacist agenda of their cis white husbands.” Somewhat hilariously, Nelson concluded her testimony by (inadvertently, I assume) referring to the male student as “him.”

Unrelatedly, a few days before that, Politico ran a piece about former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel possibly running for president in 2028. The piece talked about how Emanuel had attended a conference of the group Democracy Forward, which Politico describes as a “liberal group helping to lead litigation efforts against the Trump Administration.” During a talk at the conference, Emanuel quipped, “I am done with the discussion of locker rooms, I am done with the discussion of bathrooms and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” and alluded to a study showing that two-thirds of US eighth graders can’t read at grade level.

Emanuel appears to be making a decent point about elevating the reading levels of eighth graders, and I certainly hope we can do that. However, I, for one, Mr. Mayor, will not be “done” talking about bathrooms or locker rooms until all women and girls have access to female-only varieties of them, including in District 109 (Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago).

Meanwhile, there is talk of current Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker possibly running for president in 2028 as well. A few days ago, he was asked at a conference of the (ironically, perhaps) Illinois Education Association whether he planned to run and he declined to respond directly.

All of which leads me to wonder, “What’s up, Illinois?”

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