WASHINGTON—The spotlight of the transgender debate is about to shine bright on Texas, where conservative lawmakers are bracing to continue the fight started in North Carolina last year.

The Texas legislature introduced a bill last month requiring all government facilities, including public schools, to keep restrooms, showers, and changing areas separated by biology, not gender identity. The law allows private business owners to make their own policies in accordance with their beliefs.

The debate about transgender restroom access has forged unlikely allies. Last month, the conservative Family Policy Alliance (FPA) and the self-described “radical feminist” Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), co-filed a brief with the Supreme Court opposing efforts to allow transgender students to use the restroom of their perceived gender identity. 

WASHINGTON—When the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced last month a policy to allow transgender children into its programs, it said church affiliated troops could claim a religious exemption from the change. But it might not be that simple in practice.

For more than 100 years, BSA enrolled boys into its programs based on the gender listed on their birth certificates. But now the Scouts will allow any child to become a member as long as he or she identifies as male, regardless of biology.

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Earlier this week, the Boy Scouts of America organization announced it would allow girls who identify as boys to participate in its boys-only programs. In the past three years, the group has allowed both homosexual adults and young men to join as Scouts and leaders.

On Dec. 15, 2016, New York City issued the nation’s first public “intersex” birth certificate to Sara Kelly Keenan, 55, who was born with male XY chromosomes but with female genitals and mixed male and female internal organs. About 1 in 80,000 babies is born with this condition, called Swyer syndrome.

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

For the past 2¼ years, whenever my wife and I traveled, we made our house available for short-term rentals through Airbnb. We rented out the house to men and women of many races, religions, national origins, ethnicities, and ages. We made money; Airbnb made money; the city of Austin and the state of Texas made money (15 percent of our gross revenue).