Our country’s appalling tradition of oppressing and vilifying things that it doesn’t understand has unfortunately continued and found a new target in the transgender community.

Fresh off the heels of a major defeat with the Supreme Court defining Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, multiple parents groups have begun to raise serious opposition to Gov. Jerry Brown’s latest human rights law, Assembly Bill 1266 or the School Success and Opportunity Act, that targets transgender students in grades K-12.

The law clarifies already present anti-discrimination laws against transgender students by prohibiting schools from barring any transgender student from participating in any gender-specific activities, such as sports teams, or using gender specific facilities, such as bathrooms, in relation to their gender identity.

Similar regulations in Los Angeles and San Francisco schools are already in effect without major incident.

Of course, many parents groups have raised an issue with this. Similar to the past habit of equating gay men with pedophiles, transgender students are being treated as simply confused teenage boys who want to see the opposite sex in the locker room without any repercussions.

It’s baffling how easy it is for people to characterize such a complicated gender identity especially when most have very little to no idea how it works, while also essentially ignoring the transgender male population as a whole.

Is it really so hard to accept that both gender identity and sexuality are not strict ideas but are extremely fluid entities?

If the opposition can reach a total of 505,000 valid signatures by Nov. 12th, the bill will be put on a ballot during the next election. If not, the law goes into effect in January.

Many are going as far as to make the claim that transgender students using the bathroom in relation to their gender identity might make cisgender students “extremely uncomfortable” at school.

This puts cisgender students rights and comfort levels above that of transgender students, which is a form of inequality. In the same vein establishing a multi-gender bathroom as a third option harks back to ‘separate but equal,’ which we all know has never worked in the past.

I, as a bisexual African-American student, am growing extremely tired of America constantly discriminating and marginalizing those who are defined as ‘out of the norm’ and constantly trying to deny them the rights they deserve.

We are better than that, and if we’re not then maybe we should be.