Earlier this year, we told you about a significant victory for the rights of transgender people when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed a lower court’s ruling that upheld a Pennsylvania school district’s policy that permits transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity.
From the opinion, which you can read or download here:
The plaintiffs—a group of high school students who identify as being the same sex they were determined to have at birth (cisgender) —believe the policy violated their constitutional rights of bodily privacy, as well as Title IX, and Pennsylvania tort law. As we shall explain, we conclude that, under the circumstances here, the presence of transgender students in the locker and restrooms is no more offensive to constitutional or Pennsylvania-law privacy interests than the presence of the other students who are not transgender. Nor does their presence infringe on the plaintiffs’ rights under Title IX.
Now, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal organization designated an LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center who represents the plaintiffs in the Boyertown case, has filed petition requesting that the Supreme Court of the United States review the case.
In the petition, the Alliance Defending Freedom misgenders a transgender man who testified about his experience while a student at Boyertown as “a senior female student who identified as a male” and compares being transgender to suffering from anorexia.
Attorneys at the Women’s Law Project and co-counsel at Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief in support of the Boyertown policy that argues that the presence of transgender students in facilities corresponding to their gender identity does not violate Title IX. Rather, Title IX protects the rights of transgender students to use those facilities.
We will continue to support the Boyertown policy and the rights of transgender people and students.
“This is an attempt to roll back progress for the rights of transgender students and people by forcing schools to enforce policies that we know harms the health and safety of transgender students,” says WLP attorney Christine Castro. “Transgender children are already at increased risk for violence, bullying, harassment, and suicide.”
According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, the majority of respondents who were out or perceived as transgender while in school (K–12) experienced some form of mistreatment, including being verbally harassed (54%), physically attacked (24%), and sexually assaulted (13%) because they were transgender. Further, 17% experienced such severe mistreatment that they left a school as a result.
ADF filed its petition the day before Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance on November 20 that honors the memory of those whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing the rights of women and girls.
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