Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm that seeks to legalize anti-LGBTQ discrimination through the courts, suffered a swift and severe defeat on Thursday after the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against its effort to prohibit transgender students from using the proper bathroom at school. What’s more remarkable than the ruling itself, however, is the way it was delivered: In a highly unusual move, the court announced its decision from the bench less than an hour after oral arguments—the judicial equivalent of saying “hard pass.”
Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, the case handed down on Thursday, is essentially the inverse of more familiar trans rights cases, like that of Gavin Grimm. In 2016, Pennsylvania’s Boyertown Area School District decided to implement a trans-inclusive policy that allowed students to use the restroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity. It introduced this policy to accommodate trans high school student Aidan DeStefano and to comply with the Obama administration’s guidance(which the Trump administration later revoked). Alliance Defending Freedom sued on behalf of several students who said they felt uncomfortable sharing facilities with a transgender classmate. The firm argued that the new policy violated their constitutional right to privacy, as well as Title IX, a federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination in education.
This claim, which ADF has unsuccessfully raised elsewhere, is bizarre if not downright trollish. Multiple federal courts, including the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, have ruled that transgender students have the right under Title IX and the 14th Amendment to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. Through lawsuits like Doe v. Boyertown, ADF almost seems to be mocking these decisions, asserting that, to the contrary, non-transgender students have a right not to use facilities alongside their trans peers. Trans-inclusive policies, ADF claims, somehow infringe upon anti-trans students’ right to “bodily privacy” and must therefore be blocked by the courts. Read more via Slate