In August Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill requiring free tampons and pads to be supplied in all public school bathrooms grades 4-12, regardless of gender.

When I am presented with something that is supposed to make the lives of those around me easier, I take a moment to appreciate it and move on with my life. But some of the men of LFHS are not so well-tempered. 

According to Dean Frank Lesniak, there has been student vandalism directed at the dispenser. Most notably, when the new dispensers were first put in, some were dented. Other students went so far as to tear the faces off and take the batteries that allow the dispensers to function.

It would just be too easy for them to mind their own business. After all, the presence of a period product dispenser in the men’s room is heinous and terrible and a new national tragedy! Oh god, the agony, what will we do?

One student even felt the need to take this onto social media through a post on the LF Barstool account. The post contains a photo of the new men’s room tampon dispenser and the caption reads, “I guess we don’t teach biology anymore.” 

Hilarious, I know. So original and creative of them; nobody has ever said anything like that before. Yeah right. 

I guess it’s easier for the upset students at LFHS to believe that our administration and government have forgotten that cisgender men don’t have uteruses than to recall that transgender men exist. 

.The suicide rates of young LGBTQ+ people remain extremely high. According to the Trevor Project, 19% of young LGBTQ+ people ages 13-18 have reported attempting suicide in the past year. We do have places in the high school where young queer people can go to get help, but the behavior of some unruly cisgender men in our community isn’t making transgender students feel welcome. 

“I don’t feel safe; I’ve been harassed for being in the bathroom before,” said a trans student who wished to remain anonymous. He says that in the past a male student yelled, “Why the **** were you in the men’s bathroom?” He’s also been laughed at while leaving the men’s bathroom. 

“They could actually put a better system in place for teaching about normalizing trans people, as well as make them feel safe by having people call out transphobes,” he said. “The pronouns thing is good, but teachers should put the extra effort to make sure they know them and have them on the roll call for substitutes. People need to be held accountable.”

Social Worker Dan Maigler, who heads the Q Group at school, says the first openly transgender student faced hostility from the community. 

“She was the impetus. There was indifference, ignorance, and sometimes outright hostility about trans gender and gender nonbinary/gender fluid/gender non-conforming from both faculty and students,” he said. “So many things from the individual bathrooms around the school to the homecoming and prom courts were gender-based. We had no process to change student names in Powerschool or the yearbook. Anyone who wasn’t cis was treated as an unwelcome aberration.”

He said transgender students receive a level of treatment from faculty and administrators that previous trans students wouldn’t have ever expected. 

“Throughout the year administrators and teachers are reaching out to me regularly eager to learn how they can best support non-cisgender students. Teachers want to make it clear to all students that recognition of pronouns is normal,” Maigler explained. 

Yes, there’s been progress in recent years, but improvements still need to be made in the discipline towards transphobia. 

Kids in this community need to learn the repercussions of their actions and trans students deserve to feel safe and welcomed in their school. After all, what is the point of these tampon dispensers if the male trans student body doesn’t even feel safe enough to use the men’s restroom?