(DailyAnswer.org) – The US Supreme Court decided in January 2024 not to hear an Indiana public school district’s defense of its policy of barring transgender students from using bathrooms relating to their gender identity. The Metropolitan School District of Martinsville had appealed a lower court’s ruling that the school’s decision likely violated both rights laid out in the Constitution and federal anti-discrimination laws that protect transgender students. Due to the school’s decision a transgender student was prevented from using the boys’ bathroom.
This is not the first time the Supreme Court has avoided involvement in what is a divisive and controversial nationwide issue; in 2021 it likewise refused to hear an appeal by Gloucester County School Board in Virginia after transgender student Gavin Grimm was denied access to the boys’ bathroom and proceeded to sue the school in 2015. By the time the Supreme Court dismissed the school’s appeal, resulting in a court ruling in Grimm’s favor, the student had graduated.
Such decisions prioritizing transgender rights in schools continue to be controversial; in September 2023 hundreds of students in Perkiomen Valley School District, Pennsylvania, walked out of school to protest the board’s decision to allow transgender students to use any bathroom of their choice. The alternative of gender-neutral toilets in countries where they have been adopted is also controversial, such as that at a secondary school in Essex, England that resulted in a 16-year-old boy being arrested on suspicion of committing serious sexual assaults on a student in a gender-neutral toilet.
President Joe Biden reversed the position taken by Donald Trump in 2017 that withdrew Obama-era guidance granting transgender students the freedom to access bathrooms and locker rooms aligning with their gender identity. Biden stated in June 2021 after the restoration of these freedoms that Title IX protects both sexual orientation and gender identity. The administration did not, however, specify how this applies to bathroom access. A survey from August 2023 indicates a popular backlash against such measures, with a majority, particularly in Texas and Arizona, being against both allowing transgender students to choose which bathroom they use and allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports.
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