School is supposed to be a safe environment for students to learn. But for many students that “safe environment” can turn intimidating when simple liberties such as the right to use the bathroom they feel most comfortable in faces jeopardy. Currently transgender students and other gender-queer students have to use the bathroom coinciding with their sex assigned at birth. The fact that these teenagers, who already have a million other stressful issues to worry about, also have to feel isolated in their own schools, is an atrocity in itself that needs to be addressed. The fact of the matter is, denying gender queer students a bathroom that they will feel safe in is discrimination, just like if a cisgender women was told to “just use the men's room because no women's room exists.”

In order for Montclair High School to be a more LGBT friendly high school, steps to protect its trans youth need to be taken. If a child can not even feel protected in their own school, then what does that reflect about society. Out of the 4.6 percent of suicide attempts a year made by citizens of the U.S, about 41 percent are made by transgendered or gender nonconforming individuals. By adding these bathrooms Montclair High would be following the footsteps of schools around the country from Troy City, Ohio to San Francisco, California that are adding these new additions. Access to privileges so minuscule as the bathroom are fundamental rights that should not be shrouded in controversy or restricted and denied to any individual.

These gender-neutral bathrooms would be relatively easy to implement. With an extra girls bathroom on the second floor in the science wing and an extra girls bathroom on the first floor near the cafeteria this would be a quick transition that would need no new renovations or money poured into it.