Trans students win as Supreme Court leaves school bathroom victory in place

The U.S. Supreme Court handed transgender students and allies a victory on Tuesday by declining to hear a case on whether Indiana schools can block students from using restrooms that match their gender identities. The Court’s refusal leaves in place a lower appeals court ruling that upheld the rights of trans students’ rights to access the correct bathrooms.

In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit heard a case involving three trans boys attending schools in Martinsville and Terre Haute, Indiana. Their middle and high schools blocked their access to the boys’ restroom even though the state has no law banning trans students from using the correct facilities.

Related: ACLU sparks civil rights investigation into school district’s alleged mistreatment of trans students

The district used to support trans students, but something changed last year.

One of the students, a 13-year-old, attended school in a district where trans high schoolers are allowed to use the correct bathroom. However, school officials told the student that the policy didn’t apply to him since he was a middle schooler. Instead, officials suggested that he either use the girls’ bathroom, a unisex bathroom in the health clinic, or stop attending school altogether and attend online classes instead.

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He felt “depressed, humiliated, and angry” at school and tried to avoid going to the bathroom, which became a major distraction, his lawyers said.

The other two plaintiffs are 15-year-old twins who both have a colon condition that requires them to take laxatives and have regular access to bathrooms. Although they had used boys’ restrooms in their schools without any problem since 2021, school employees began to admonish them. The students were also told to go to the girls’ bathroom or a bathroom in the health office. One of the students had an accident once because he couldn’t get to the health office in time.

The twins’ school’s trans bathroom policy required numerous factors to be taken into consideration and the school’s administration said that trans students needed unspecified surgical changes before they could use the correct bathroom. Gender-affirming surgery is banned for trans people under the age of 18 in Indiana.

The appeals court took into account the fact that Title IX bans discrimination based on sex in schools that receive federal money, which includes public schools. Citing the 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton Co. that found that job discrimination against LGBTQ+ people necessarily takes sex into account and is therefore prohibited under Title VII, the appeals court ruled that the trans boys are likely to succeed in their case and that preventing them from using the correct bathroom.

This marks at least the second time that the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case on trans student bathroom bans, leaving in place a victory for trans rights. In 2021, the court declined to review a court ruling in favor of Gavin Grimm, a trans male student, after the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia tried to create a policy to block him from using the boys’ restroom. The district court ruled that the school board’s policy violated Title IX as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Indiana’s recently passed anti-LGBTQ+ laws include one allowing schools to forcibly out trans students to their potentially unsupportive parents when students ask to use names and pronouns different than those assigned to them at birth, and a law prohibiting the instruction of “human sexuality” in pre-school through third grade (even though the subject isn’t taught in those grades).

The state has also recently passed a law banning prisons from granting gender-affirmation surgery to trans inmates, a prohibition on bans against so-called conversion therapy, a broad censorship law banning “harmful materials” from school libraries, and a law prohibiting minors from accessing gender-affirming health care (including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy), The Indy Star reported.

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