This petition is on behalf of my son's transgender friend who was bullied out of school because he wasn't allowed to use the boy's bathroom. We want him to have the right to use whichever boys room he needs to use. He's identified as a boy most of his life and when he started transitioning in middle school, girls complained about a boy being in the girl’s bathroom. The middle school he attended decided he should use the boy's bathroom because that would be the most comfortable option for everyone. Now in high school for three years, he's been using the boy's bathroom at Socastee. One day in the fall semester, a male teacher was walking out of the boy's bathroom when he was headed in. The teacher must've seen his records and known his sex, which appears to have bothered him. The next day, administrators called him into the office and told him he could either use the girl's bathroom or go to the nurse’s office. Most people don’t know he is transgender and consider him a boy. If he started using the girl's bathroom in 12th grade, it would've created a problem. Which could've even wound up dangerous for him. As for the nurse’s office, it’s out of the way of his classes. It's downstairs on the first floor of the school and the school has three stories, making tardiness an issue. He tried avoiding the bathroom altogether, which is unhealthy. No student should have to risk kidney infections to avoid being singled out. It's utterly ridiculous that the school is creating an unsafe environment where there wasn't one before! His mother told him to keep using the boy's bathroom. Two weeks ago, he left an assembly to use the bathroom and passed teachers along the way. Although a teacher asked him to use the closest bathroom, he said it was dirty and went to the next one. He said the teacher followed him. He used the boy's bathroom. The next day he was suspended from school for a day He is now enrolled in an online school and he's missing out on everything he enjoyed, drama being one of them. He had to drop out of the play he was doing with my son. His mom worries about this happening to other transgender students in Horry County Schools. "Let the transgender kids be themselves,” she said. “Let them be safe and let them be comfortable. Let them have their education in an environment where they are not harassed or felt to be unsafe.” A spokesperson for Horry County Schools said the district doesn’t have a specific policy on bathroom usage for transgender students, but will make accommodations based on individual needs and schools. The student's mother said Socastee High School administrators would not cooperate with her on a plan for the student's bathroom use and said the principal told her he needed a doctor's note to work through the issue. He shouldn't need a doctor's note when it was clearly the teacher(s) that had the issue. Let him use the boy's bathroom and suspend/fire the teachers for bullying!