Despite ongoing pushback from the Trump administration against transgender anti-discrimination policies, a federal court in Virginia has ruled in favor of Gavin Grimm, a transgender student who was denied the right to use the boys’ bathroom in his high school.
Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen, who holds court in U.S. District Court’s Eastern District of Virginia, rejected a motion to dismiss Grimm’s lawsuit against the Gloucester County school board. Instead, she ruled that the school board’s policy—which forces students to use bathrooms based on their sex assigned at birth—violated both Title IX and the Equal Equal Protection Clause within the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution.
“Mr. Grimm was subjected to sex discrimination because he was viewed as failing to conform to the sex stereotype propagated by the [board’s policy],” the court wrote in its order. “Because the Policy relies on sex-based stereotypes, the Court finds that review of the Policy is subject to intermediate scrutiny.”
The court also ruled that sex and gender are separate from each other and that the school board’s policy “allowed the Board to isolate, distinguish, and subject to differential treatment any student who deviated from what the Board viewed a male or female student should be.”
The court ruled that “attempting to draw lines based on physiological and anatomical characteristics proves unmanageable… [H]ow would the Board’s policy apply to individuals who have had genital surgery, individuals whose genitals were injured in an accident, or those with intersex traits who have genital characteristics that are neither typically male nor female?”
BREAKING: A federal court in Virginia has sided with Gavin Grimm saying that federal law protects transgender students from being forced to use separate restroom facilities.
— ACLU (@ACLU) May 22, 2018
The district court's ruling vindicates what Gavin has been saying from the beginning: Federal law protects him and all students who are transgender from being stigmatized and excluded.
— ACLU (@ACLU) May 22, 2018
With the court rejecting the school board’s motion to dismiss, Judge Wright Allen instead ruled that counsel for both parties must schedule a settlement conference within 30 days.
“After fighting this policy since I was 15 years old, I finally have a court decision saying that what the Gloucester County School Board did to me was wrong and it was against the law,” Grimm said in a press release from the ACLU. “I was determined not to give up because I didn’t want any other student to have to suffer the same experience that I had to go through.”
This is a win for Gavin and many other trans kids who have been rooting for him. When the Supreme Court declined to hear his case last year, Gavin told me he wouldn't give up hope. He was right. https://t.co/ZbRo7NOKqR pic.twitter.com/ZyyzUP9aOS
— Samantha Michaels (@sjmichaels) May 22, 2018
Here's today's court order, denying the school board's motion to dismiss Gavin's lawsuit. The board's argument, that it did not discriminate against Gavin by blocking him from the boy's bathroom, is "resoundingly unpersuasive," the court wrote. https://t.co/Cu2y7P8Jzd pic.twitter.com/fII8BsO4qZ
— Samantha Michaels (@sjmichaels) May 22, 2018
In 2015, Judge Robert Doumar (white dude/Reagan appointee) sided with the Gloucester County School Board and dismissed Gavin Grimm's case.
— Imani Gandy (Orca’s Version) ⚓️ (@AngryBlackLady) May 22, 2018
The case was reassigned to Judge Arenda Allen (Black woman/Obama appointee). She just sided with Grimm.
Elections matter. Courts matter.
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Grimm’s ruling is part of a lengthy legal battle that first began in 2014 when Grimm was a 15-year-old sophomore at Gloucester High School. The school’s administrators initially let him use the boys’ restroom, but after complaints from parents and students, the school board instead ushered a policy based on one’s “biological genders.”
In 2015, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on Grimm’s behalf, sparking a lengthy appeals process that was set to reach the Supreme Court. But after the Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidelines from the Department of Education on transgender protections for students, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts first. This ruling marks a major victory that reaffirms Grimm’s argument and paves the way for future transgender-inclusive interpretations of Title IX and other federal sex discrimination laws and policies.
H/T HuffPost