A Wisconsin school district is asking the Supreme Court to review an appeals court’s decision allowing a transgender teenager to use the boys’ bathroom while the student’s lawsuit proceeds through the courts.
Ashton Whitaker, a biological 18-year-old girl who identifies as a male and has reportedly begun hormone replacement therapy, challenged as discriminatory a policy that directs boys and girls to use the bathroom that comports with the gender listed on their birth certificates. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the transgender student against the Kenosha Unified School District, which petitioned the Supreme Court Friday to review the Midwestern federal appeals court’s decision.
“When analyzing bathroom segregation, one would be hard pressed to concoct a more pristine example of a practice that is the polar opposite of sex stereotyping,” wrote Ronald S. Stadler, attorney for the school district. “KUSD’s policy did not require that [Whitaker] act in a certain way, dress in a certain way, or conform with any other stereotypes associated with one’s sex. The policy did not hold respondent’s non-conformance against him. Rather the policy mandated that respondent use a restroom that corresponds with his birth certificate, regardless of how he presented himself, expressed himself or behaved. The policy ignored every single stereotypical aspect and relied solely and exclusively on biological sex.”
The Wisconsin school district also argued in its petition that while the 7th Circuit’s ruling applied specifically to bathroom use, it also raised privacy concerns and “opens the door for transgender students to demand access to showers and locker room facilities of the biological sex.”
Whitaker’s attorneys at the Transgender Law Center and Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC responded to the petition in a statement calling the Wisconsin school district’s petition disappointing.
“It is troubling that KUSD would go to such lengths to defend its discriminatory and harmful actions against Ash, a high school student who just wanted to be treated like any other boy, especially now that he has graduated and started college,” Whitaker’s attorneys said. “We are confident that KUSD’s wrongheaded and legally incorrect position will continue to be rejected, as it has been at every stage of this case so far.”
