On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a case from parents in Oregon who want to stop transgender students from using locker rooms and bathrooms with students of the same biological sex, The Associated Press reported. “The petition filed by the advocacy group Parents for Privacy was rejected by the justices without comment,” Law and Crime stated.
The case, Parents for Privacy v. Barr, involved a high school student in Oregon who is biologically a girl but says she is a boy. The Dallas School district in Oregon’s policy gave the student the right to share locker rooms and bathrooms with boys. In 2017, parents of students in the school sued the district, arguing that the policy infringed on the privacy rights of their children.
U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez dismissed the action in 2018, prompting the parents to appeal the decision.
In July 2019, the Ninth Circuit took on the case, and explained the case as follows: “The Dallas School District No. 2 implemented a Student Safety Plan after a student who had been born and who remained biologically female publicly identified as a boy, and asked school officials to allow him to use the boys’ bathroom and locker room. The Plan acknowledged the student as a ‘transgender male’ and permitted him to use the boys’ locker room and bathroom facilities with his peers.”
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the lawsuit filed by the parents, arguing that the school district’s Student Safety Plan wanted to avoid discrimination and guarantee the safety of transgender students. The court stated:
The panel held that plaintiffs failed to show that the contours of the privacy right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment were so broad as to protect against the School District’s implementation of the Student Safety Plan. This conclusion was supported by the fact that the Student Safety Plan provided alternative options and privacy protections to those who did not want to share facilities with a transgender student, even though those alternative options admittedly appeared inferior and less convenient.
Writing for the Ninth Circuit, Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote:
We also hold that a policy that treats all students equally does not discriminate based on sex in violation of Title IX, and that the normal use of privacy facilities does not constitute actionable sexual harassment under Title IX just because a person is transgender. We hold further that the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide a fundamental parental right to determine the bathroom policies of the public schools to which parents may send their children, either independent of the parental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it. Finally, we hold that the school district’s policy is rationally related to a legitimate state purpose, and does not infringe Plaintiffs’ First Amendment free exercise rights because it does not target religious conduct.
