As I’ve said before here on the blog, just because you work in education doesn’t necessarily mean you’re actually, you know, educated. Such is the case with California Baptist University, a religious post-secondary school that expelled a student when it was discovered she is a transgender woman.
Domaine Javier had already been accepted to California Baptist University’s nursing program with a dual scholarship in music and academics when she came out as transgender on an episode of MTV’s “True Life” in 2011. Months after the show aired, Javier received a letter from the university accusing her of fraud: She had listed her gender as female on her admissions application, an identity claim California Baptist refused to accept. Shortly after that, Javier was expelled.
[…] Goldberg also believes that the school’s policy sets up women like Javier to fail no matter what they do. If Javier, who has identified and presented as a woman for years, had checked off “male” on her admissions form, the school may have questioned her application anyway. After all, her gender presentation and application still wouldn’t have “matched.”
Advertisement“There is no indication from these facts that the student intended to misrepresent herself or her identity to the school. In fact, as the complaint points out, to represent herself as male would have also created the appearance of fraud. It’s a we-win-you-lose framework,” according to Goldberg. [SOURCE]
Unfortunately, that pretty much nails the crux of discrimination on the head: they can back it up with whatever arbitrary rules they want — “The Bible says so!” or “It’s special rights!” tend to be the usual ones — but the thing about arbitrary rules is that they can literally mean anything they need to. Regardless how a trans person identifies themself, some asshole is going to do mental gymnastics until they can find a way to justify their own dipshit hatred. If this university has a problem with transgender students, then this university has a problem. And that’s their own damn fault, not Javier’s.
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