RALEIGH, North Carolina — A petition has been launched urging the Wake County Public School System to allow students to use the restroom of their choice regardless of their gender.

The petition was started after Hayden Riner, 17, said she was threatened with suspension from Athens Drive High School in Raleigh when it was reported that she was using the boys’ restroom. Riner, though female, currently identifies as “male.”

With more than 700 signatures, the petition asks “for a change in [Wake County Public School] policy to specifically protect transgender student’s right to use a restroom congruent with their internal identity and protect them from bullying and harassment from students and faculty.”

According to WUNC, School System Counseling Director Crystal Reardon said that administrators consider requests to use the bathroom of the opposite sex on a case-by-case basis.

“We’re making decisions based on the desire of the student, the wishes of the parents and the availability of facilities in the school,” she said.

Political activists on both sides of the issue spoke to The News & Observer about Riner’s case.

“These restroom policies in schools essentially convey the message to children that their gender is not connected to their anatomy,” said the Rev. Mark Creech, director of the Raleigh-based Christian Action League. “These policies cooperate and facilitate what has been rightly characterized as a mental disorder and thus is harming the children.”

John Rustin, president of the N.C. Family Policy Council, also spoke out against letting students use the restroom of the opposite sex.

“To adopt a policy that could have a detrimental effect on a wide swath of students to accommodate a single student or a small handful of students when a different type of accommodation could meet that same need doesn’t seem like a common sense or a reasonable approach,” Rustin said.

But Chris Sgro, executive director of Equality North Carolina, appeared to favor letting Riner and other students use the restroom of their choice.

“We all know that being an adolescent and being a high school student is hard enough,” Sgro said. “We don’t need to further subject folks who are subject to discrimination to go through an even harder process to have a basic comfort to use the restroom during the school day.”

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