Passive Win After Supreme Court Declines Indiana’s Transgender Students Bathroom Case
The Supreme Court declines to rule on whether schools can govern which bathroom and what facilities transgender students have access to, regardless of gender identity.
This rejection extends a previous ruling that denies federally funded schools from discrimination on grounds of gender or sexual identity.
Previously, a lower court ruled in favor of allowing transgender students to access facilities that align with their gender identity. As the Supreme Court has thrown the current case out, this still stands. Perhaps not a total victory, but a a win is still a win.
This order came after a lawsuit was filed in December of 2021 that alleged three trans boys in schools in Martinsville and Terre Haute, Indiana were facing discrimination on the basis of their gender identity.
In one of the cases, The Metropolitan School District of Martinsville refused a seventh grade transgender student access to bathrooms that aligned with his gender identity despite the state’s law against this discrimination.
The lawsuit also alleged that the school staff and administrators regularly misused the boy’s pronouns, resulting in feelings of being “isolated and punished” by the school and a decline in his academic performance.
The other two plaintiffs are 15-year-old twins with colon conditions, and they are dependent on having accessible restrooms. Although they had used the boys’ bathroom with no issue since 2021, school employees had begun to reprimand them. They were told to use the girls bathroom or the bathroom in the health office. The school’s bathroom policy, which defies state laws, resulted in one of the students having an accident because the “acceptable bathroom” (in the heath office) was too far.
After a 2022 preliminary injunction by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, The Metropolitan School District of Martinsville was required to allow the boys to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.
In August of 2023, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which includes Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin) ruled in favor of the boy. The court found that the school district had discriminated against the student, citing the 2020 Supreme Court case of Bostock v Clayton County in their ruling. The landmark case protects employees and students against discrimination because of sexual or gender identity.
A similar case in Virginia, Grimm v Gloucester County, created the precedent for transgender students back in 2020. The ruling, which sided in favor of Gavin Grimm, granted students the right to access facilities that correspond with their gender and have their gender recognized in official documents.
While the Supreme Court’s dismissal of this new proposal offers some respite to the community, the IndyStar reports that the Indiana courts have passed two anti-trans bills. One bill prohibits gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors (which will go into effect at the end of this year), and the other requires parental notification for students who wish to change their pronouns.
With anti-trans and anti-gays bills popping up all over the country, keep your eyes peeled and your ballots ready as we head into election season.
That being said, can’t we all just agree that everyone needs to use bathrooms? Or is this concept so foreign that forcing people’s bladders to suffer the consequences is a more appropriate solution than the obvious: not giving a shit what bathroom someone shits in?
Featured image from Unsplash, taken by Aiden Craver
