A friend of mine who does religious liberty litigation said to me recently that she’s often stunned by how unaware ordinary people are about what’s going on in the courts, and the serious, mounting threats to religious liberty. I concurred — and it’s not just religious liberty. Things are moving very fast on the LGBT front. People all over aren’t thinking about what’s going to hit them. Take for example what’s going on in Louisiana:

As state and federal leaders feud over whether transgender students should be able to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity, public educators in Louisiana say they are just beginning to grapple with an issue that is brand new to many of them.

Hollis Milton, superintendent for West Feliciana Parish and president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, said he cannot recall a time during his six years as a superintendent educating any transgender students in his small 2,100-student district north of Baton Rouge. And it’s not something he and his fellow superintendents had been talking about.

“I don’t remember having a single conversation about this,” Milton said. “This just came out of nowhere.”

The Obama administration is prepared to hold back $1.1 billion from our cash-strapped state if we don’t let transgendered students use the bathroom and locker room of their choice.

Imagine my surprise when Your Working Boy appeared in this story, from the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Louisiana School for Math, Science, and The Arts in Natchitoches, a high school for academically gifted students who live on campus, has enrolled a handful of transgender students in the past few years.

“It’s never been an issue for us, and we’ve always been able to accommodate students,” said Patrick Widhalm, LSMSA’s executive director.

Sure, but that’s not the point. The point is whether or not your previous accommodations will be considered sufficient by the Title IX enforcers if the trans student requests to live in an opposite-sex dorm. More:

But as the Obama administration’s position on the bathroom issue became national news last month, one prominent alum, Rod Dreher, a writer for American Conservative magazine, brought up the school in an online piece called “Transgender Dorm Daze.”

In his post, which sparked a testy online debate among school alumni, Dreher singled out a current transgender student, noting that student could insist on moving into the boy’s dorm and, according to the Obama administration, the school would have to comply.

“A biological female living in a dorm full of underage teenage boys. What could possibly go wrong?” Dreher wrote.

Widhalm said so far transgender students have remained with their original roommates and haven’t sought to change dorms. He said that the school is careful on the front end in how it matches up students and forges good relationships with parents from the get-go.

The words “so far” are doing a lot of the work there. More:

“We try to be pretty upfront with parents when they are going through orientation at the school,” Widhalm said.

Dreher’s concerns are overstated, he said.

“I respect Rod Dreher a great deal, but I think there has to be counterbalance to what he said,” Widhalm said.

All of the transgender students have lived in the girls dorm, where students live in suites with three rooms to one bathroom. The boys dorm, by contrast, has much larger group bathrooms.

Widhalm expects this will become even less of an issue after a new modern dorm is built, which is likely to start construction in 2017.

Hmm. I like Pat Widhalm, whom I’ve known for years, but I don’t see how my concerns are “overstated,” nor do I see what the “counterbalance” to what I said might be. If the Obama guidelines stand up in court, and a biological girl who claims to be a transgender boy asks to live in the boy’s dorm, claiming she’s a boy, the school will have to accommodate her request or be in violation of Title IX.

I don’t fault the school for this. I fault Obama for this, for putting this and other schools in a terrible position. And I don’t see what difference a new dorm would make. You’re still going to have the same problem: must a biological girl who identifies as a boy be allowed to live in the boy’s dorm if she requests it, or biological male who identifies as female, etc.? Remember, these are all minors.

Hollis Milton, quoted in the story, is the head of my local public schools. I don’t blame him for being caught up short on this stuff. You can’t imagine that it would be an issue in a small town like ours. Until all of a sudden, it is. If somebody had told you five years ago that whether or not the federal government could or should force schools to let transgender teenage boys use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms was about to become a national issue, you wouldn’t have believed it.

One of these days, it’s coming to your town. My religious liberty lawyer friend said in a lot of states, people are complacent, thinking these things only happen far away. They’re going to be in for a very rude shock before too much longer, said the lawyer.

If you feel like your state doesn’t really have to worry about this stuff, you are very wrong. You had better have a plan for when it comes to your kid’s school.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that the Advocate report states something factually untrue about my blog post. It says I singled out a trans high school student. I did no such thing, and could not have done any such thing, because I don’t know any of their names. Here’s what I actually wrote in that blog post:

My alma mater is a public boarding school for gifted and talented high school students. There are several self-declared transgenders studying there now, including a female-to-male genderfluid girl (meaning she is a male or female, depending on her whim). According to the new federal directive, not only is the school prohibited from telling these students’ parents about their children’s behavior without the children’s permission, but if one of these minors decides that he or she wants to live in the opposite sex’s dorm, the school has no choice but to permit it.

A biological female living in a dorm full of underage teenage boys. What could possibly go wrong?

If I had named a high school kid, that would have been outrageous and morally indefensible. But I did no such thing.