Alliance Defending Freedom group calls for Supreme Court to strike down transgender-inclusive toilet policy
The anti-LGBT group says the policy discriminates against other students
By Steve Brown
The anti-LGBT group, Alliance Defending Freedom, has called for the Supreme Court to strike down a transgender-inclusive toilet policy.
The group – which is representing several students in the Boyertown Area School District in Pennsylvania – have argued that the students’ rights to privacy were violated by the policy which allows transgender pupils to use toilets and changing rooms consistent to their gender identity.
According to the Washing Blade, the argument has already been “rebuffed by a trial court in Pennsylvania and the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals”.
Now the ADF have submitted a petition to the Supreme Court his week and contends that the policy violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 which bans sex discrimination in education.
Title IX has been used for a basis for transgender inclusion and several courts in the US have held that anti-trans discrimination is the same as sex discrimination.
But the anti-LGBT group argues that the policy discriminates against students who are uncomfortable with someone of the “opposite” sex in toilets and changing rooms.
The petition reads: “The claim is based on petitioners’ own sex, which dictates whom they consent to be with when undressing in a school privacy facility.
“And the claim is based on sex in a more general way because the school’s permission to use a locker room or restroom depends on the sex designation of that facility.
“Either way, the claim falls within Title IX’s plain language, contrary to the Third Circuit’s conclusion.”
Ria Tabacco Mar, senior staff attorney for the ACLU, told the Blade that ADF’s arguments are “offensive and not supported by the evidence in Boyertown or schools around the country.”
The petition, she added, is “part of a larger pattern of attacks against the transgender community, including from the Trump administration.”