Cathy Ruse, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and director of the organization’s Human Dignity wing, likened a school board’s decision to construct gender-neutral restrooms in elementary schools to sexual abuse.
Ruse joined FRC president Tony Perkins on yesterday’s episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss the North Kansas City school district’s decision to install single-person bathrooms in its schools that are gender-neutral with the goal of providing students more privacy and ensuring inclusion, after having received positive feedback on a similar restroom installed in another facility. While Ruse was deriding the school district’s move to construct these one-person restrooms, she leaned on the thoroughly trashed “bathroom predator” myth, likening the school’s decision to sexual abuse.
“We’ve got to remember that girls are primarily the children that unfortunately may have been victims of assault or abuse, OK? They vastly outnumber gender-confused kids—vastly outnumber. So you’re now taking this much larger population of girls who are vulnerable, who are sensitive, and they’re putting them in a very, very uncomfortable position. And what these girls and young women will say—and I’ve heard them testify in front of school boards—they will say, ‘My abuser told me I couldn’t tell anybody, I couldn’t complain,’ and now the schools are basically saying the same thing,” Ruse said.
Perkins responded, “That’s exactly right.”
She added, “All of these realities of human nature, we’re supposed to forget. It’s fake science. And we’re forcing these kids to deny reality, deny their God-given instincts—you know what I mean?”
Perkins went on to claim that putting gender-neutral restrooms in public schools was like “soaking a kid in gasoline and sending him to a bonfire” and said that the mandates would make students vulnerable to sexual abuse from their peers as students advance into junior high and high school.
