The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case that would have blocked transgender students from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender identity.
The high court’s move was hailed as a win for advocates who have wondered if the court’s new conservative majority would make rulings that might threaten LGBT rights.
“The Supreme Court has once again said that transgender youth are not a threat to other students,” said Chase Strangio, deputy director for trans justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, in a statement. “The decision not to take this case is an important and powerful message to trans and non-binary youth that they deserve to share space with and enjoy the benefits of school alongside their non-transgender peers.”
In 2018, the U.S. District court in Portland, Ore., dismissed a case brought by Parents for Privacy, a Dallas, Ore., group that challenged the local school district’s “Student Safety Plan,” saying the new policy violated the privacy rights of cisgender students and staff not to be exposed to transgender children using the bathrooms.
In February, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision, saying that “There is no Fourteenth Amendment fundamental privacy right to avoid all risk of intimate exposure to or by a transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth.”
Parents for Privacy argued in their brief to the high court that the school safety plan “interferes with parents’ rights to direct the upbringing of their children, schoolchildren’s rights to bodily privacy, parents’ and children’s rights to free exercise of religion, and children’s rights to be free from hostile educational environments under Title IX.”
Activists have worried that conservative rulings on LGBT issues might be forthcoming from the court, since the shift to a conservative majority with the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
But the court decided to let the lower ruling stand.
“This was a cruel case trying to punish a school district for letting a trans boy use the boys’ locker room and restroom,” Gabriel Arkles, attorney with the New York-based Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund tweeted Monday.
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SO MUCH for Gorsuch, Kavenaugh and Barret..
BUNCH of cowards.
a total failure of our government at every level to do the right thing instead they kick it down the road.
real dissapointment.
Times like this, i really wonder, IS THERE EVEN A NEED to keep having a scotus around?
Why not just let it all hang out in the classroom, starting with the Teachers. This is obviously the next step to secular social insanity, where if you have no rights to privacy, you have not rights to your privates either. The entire male class of this student body should demand co-equal showers with the girls who will soon get pregnant faster than a 1938 National Socialism Nuremberg rally where 900 teenaged girls became pregnant for the cause of the Hitler youth movement, to help repopulate the master race of future national SOCIALIST warriors. That one did not work out very well for the Germans either.
AND EVERY SANE parent, should IMMEDIATELY and permanently, cease sending their kids TO THESE indoctrination centers..
Disgusting! The destruction of children. There are going to be many boys, who say they are “transgender”, so they can go into the girls locker room. Just like when the “Boy Scouts” allowed homosexuals, to be scout leaders and look what happened. Young boys were raped. Sodom and Gomorrah aka the United Socialist Republic of America!!!