The Law and Justice Room
Even Sotomayor was troubled by this issue in a prior case. Several related cases have side-stepped the bathroom issue. No longer.
Bathroom Bans for Transgender Youths Are Poised for Supreme Court Review
When the Supreme Court heard arguments in 2019 about the rights of gay and transgender workers, the justices seemed fixated on bathrooms.
In all, five justices explored questions related to who can use which bathroom, though bathrooms did not figure in the cases before them.
“Let’s not avoid the difficult issue,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, posing a hypothetical one: “You have a transgender person who rightly is identifying as a woman and wants to use the women’s bathroom.”
She added, “So the hard question is: How do we deal with that?”
David D. Cole, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union representing a transgender woman, seemed puzzled.
“That is a question, Justice Sotomayor,” he said. “It is not the question in this case.”
The justice pressed on. “Once we decide the case in your favor,” she said, “then that question is inevitable.”
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The two sides in the 11th Circuit decision found almost no common ground and appeared to talk past each other.
Writing for the majority, Judge Barbara Lagoa said the issue was simple: The school board was free to require students to use the bathrooms that corresponded with their “biological sex,” which she defined as “sex based on chromosomal structure and anatomy at birth.”
In dissent, Judge Jill A. Pryor said that definition was at odds with modern medical science, particularly by failing to account for “the primacy of two biological components in particular, gender identity and neurological sex.”
Judge Pryor focused on the harm she said the school board’s policy caused to Drew, who “was forced to endure a stigmatizing and humiliating walk of shame — past the boys’ bathrooms and into a single-stall ‘gender neutral’ bathroom.”
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Originally Posted by midcan5
