Unanimous Decision Says Title IX and 14th Amendment Protect Trans Students
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has just handed down a groundbreaking ruling on the civil rights of transgender students. The Court ruled in favor of Wisconsin’s Ashton Whitaker, now a 17-year old high school senior, who was forced to travel to the other side of the building to use a restroom designated for him.
“I’ve basically stopped using the bathroom at school altogether, which makes it painful and difficult to get through the school day,” Whitaker (photo above, with his mother) said last summer when he first sued his school district.
“In this landmark decision, the unanimous three-judge panel held that transgender students are protected from discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the Transgender Law Center, which represents Whitaker, writes Tuesday afternoon.
“The court agreed with the lower court’s conclusions that Ash was harmed significantly by the Kenosha Unified School District’s discriminatory practices that singled him out from other students and that KUSD failed to provide more than “sheer conjecture†that permitting Ash to use the boys’ restrooms would harm anyone.”
Zack Ford at ThinkProgress reports the Kenosha Unified School District had “argued that allowing Ash to use the boys’ bathrooms would somehow infringe on ‘the privacy rights of all 22,160 students’ in the district. The Court dismissed this argument as being ‘based upon sheer conjecture and abstraction.'”
Ford points to this key portion of today’s ruling:
A transgender student’s presence in the restroom provides no more of a risk to other students’ privacy rights than the presence of an overly curious student of the same biological sex who decides to sneak glances at his or her classmates performing their bodily functions. Or for that matter, any other student who uses the bathroom at the same time. Common sense tells us that the communal restroom is a place where individuals act in a discreet manner to protect their privacy and those who have true privacy concerns are able to utilize a stall.
U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper in September ruled that the school district’s discriminatory practices had caused emotional, psychological and physical harm to Whitaker. Last July, when he filed his lawsuit, Whitaker said, “I worry about how I’m going to navigate the demands of senior year if I can’t even go to the bathroom without worrying that I’m being watched.â€
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Image via Transgender Law Center