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Federal Court Rules “Catholic Hospital” Owned by University of Maryland Medical Systems Can’t Refuse Gender-Affirming Surgery for Transgender Patients

Posted on: January 9th, 2023 by Art Leonard No Comments

Consolidation in the health care industry has resulted in some odd situations, as shown by a federal court ruling on January 6 that a “Catholic Hospital” that appears to be owned by a state university system must comply with the anti-discrimination requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which the court concluded requires the hospital to perform hysterectomies for transgender men seeking the operation for purposes of gender transition, because it performs hysterectomies for cisgender women as prescribed treatment for their medical conditions.  Hammons v. University of Maryland Medical System Corporation, 2023 WL 121741, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2896 (D. Md., Jan. 6, 2023).

Jesse Hammons, identified as female at birth, was diagnosed with gender dysphoria for which his doctor prescribed a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) as part of his gender transition.  He was scheduled for the procedure to take place at University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, where his doctor scheduled the operation for January 6, 2020.  When his doctor conferred with St. Joseph’s chief medical officer about the impending surgery a few weeks ahead of the scheduled date, he was told, “No, we cannot do transgender surgery at St. Joseph.” The hospital cancelled the procedure.

The contract in which University of Maryland Medical Systems purchased St. Joseph Hospital from a Catholic organization in 2012 provides that UMMS must operate St. Joseph “consistent with Catholic values” as set forth in the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services (ERD) promulgated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  The Board of St. Joseph formally adopted the ERD as part of its operational policies.  Also, UMMS made an agreement with the Archbishop of Baltimore that required St. Joseph Medical Center to comply with the ERD.   The ERD categorically prohibits the performance of gender transition treatment at St. Joseph.

While University of Maryland is a state institution subject to constitutional non-discrimination requirements, UMMS argues that it is separately incorporated as a health care institution and is not part of the University of Maryland.  However, it is a recipient of federal money through the Medicare and Medicaid programs, so it is also subject to the non-discrimination requirements under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which imposes a ban on discrimination on grounds prohibited by a list of federal laws, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which forbids sex discrimination.  Maryland is within the jurisdiction of the federal 4th Circuit courts, which have ruled that Title IX forbids discrimination because of gender identity, consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock decision.

Mr. Hammons eventually got his hysterectomy performed at another hospital many months later, but decided to sue the University of Maryland, its Health System, and St. Joseph’s for violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments and unlawful discrimination under the Affordable Care Act, seeking damages for his economic and emotional injuries.  Hammons is represented by the ACLU and cooperating attorneys from the firm of Patterson Belknap.

The defendants moved to dismiss the constitutional claims, arguing that as state entities, they were immune from suit in federal court.  Alternatively, the claimed that if they were regarded as private entities, they enjoyed ecclesiastical immunity as well as protection under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Supreme Court has embraced the view that the concept of “sovereign immunity” prohibits the states from being sued on federal claims in federal courts unless they have agreed to “waive” their immunity.  Senior U.S. District Judge Deborah Chasanow concluded that this doctrine required her to dismiss the constitutional claims against UM, UMMS and St. Joseph’s. She appears to have considered them to be state actors.

On the other hand, as she found in her January 6 ruling, under the Affordable Care Act, a condition of a health care provider receiving federal money is their agreement to waive any sovereign immunity claim they might have as to enforcement of the ACA against them in federal court.

This set up interesting paradoxes in this case.  By contract, UMMS is required to operate St. Joseph according to the ERD, which bans the performance of any procedure that terminates reproductive capacity unless it is required for medical purposes.  St. Joseph argued that UMMS, not St. Joseph, was the recipient of federal funding, so St. Joseph should not be subject to the ACA requirement, but the court found that as a wholly-owned unit of UMMS, St. Joseph was a part of the federal funding recipient entity.  Only fair, since St. Joseph, although operating on “Catholic principles,” was found to enjoy sovereign immunity from being sued in federal court on the constitutional claims because the court considered it to be part of the University of Maryland — which it claims it is not.

St. Joseph also argued that it had a valid defense under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), since being required to perform the procedure for Mr. Hammons would substantially burden its free exercise of religion.  But wait, can an entity that has been found by the court to be a state actor with sovereign immunity against constitutional claims make a free exercise of religion claim?  Which raises the further question whether would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment for a state university to agree to operate one of its wholly owned medical centers based on religious principles.  Hammons raised this issue in his complaint, but the judge avoided it by focusing on court decisions limiting the application of RFRA to cases brought by the government.

Although the Supreme Court hasn’t spoken to the issue, most (but not all) federal courts faced with the question have determined that RFRA applies only when the federal government is the plaintiff seeking to enforce a federal statute that burdens free exercise of religion by the defendant.  In this case, the court has found (perhaps mistakenly?) that a unit of the state government (University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center) is the defendant.  The plaintiff, Mr. Hammons, is a private citizen.  Although the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals hasn’t spoken to the issue, several trial courts within the district have sided with those courts who find RFRA inapplicable in litigation brought by a private citizen to enforce a claim under a federal statute.  And, UMMS’s argument that it and St. Joseph are private, non-governmental actors, would make this a lawsuit between private parties with no government involvement.  Judge Chasanow concluded that St. Joseph could not raise a RFRA defense, because it was not being sued by the federal government.  (One might just as well say that an entity wholly owned and operated by a government agency may not raise a RFRA defense, because both the federal and the state governments are prohibited by the 1st Amendment from “practicing” a religion under the Establishment Clause, but this would be irrelevant if one accepts UMMS’s argument contention that it is not part of the public University whose name it shares.)

Getting back to the easier issue in the case, Judge Chasanow had no trouble determining that refusing a hysterectomy to Mr. Hammons was discrimination in violation of the ACA.   The 4th Circuit ruled in 2020, after the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, that sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX includes discrimination because of transgender status.  Because the ACA forbids health care providers from discriminating on grounds prohibited by Title IX, St. Joseph may not discriminate because of transgender status to deny Hammons his hysterectomy unless it otherwise enjoys a religious exemption, which it was claiming as a defense.

St. Joseph tried to argue that it was not singling out transgender people, but rather applying a general principle that it would not perform operations to terminate reproductive capacity except for medical reasons.  But it is now past the day when defendants can credibly argue that gender dysphoria is not a medical reason to perform a hysterectomy.  Numerous courts have now rejected the claim that insurance policy provisions excluding coverage for “cosmetic procedures” can be used to block individuals from getting coverage for hysterectomies that are performed for the purpose of gender transition, and numerous federal courts have concluded, in the context of lawsuits by transgender prisoners seeking health care, that gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition.

The bottom line, of course, was that this scheduled procedure was cancelled explicitly because the operation was for the purpose of gender transition, so it could not logically be treated as other than discrimination due to Hammons’ transgender status, bringing it within the scope of the sex discrimination ban, assuming that Section 1557 applies to St. Joseph.  (This is another point of significant contention, because Title IX is the source of the ACA non-discrimination requirement under Section 1557, and Title IX has a statutory exemption for religious educational institutions.  Some have argued that this exemption should carry over to the ACA as well and cover religious health care institutions, a point of contention between the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration with dueling regulatory language.)

Senior Judge Chasanow was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

 

 

Federal District Judge Issues Injunction Against Tennessee Bathroom Warning-Sign Law

Posted on: July 11th, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

In May, Tennessee enacted a law intended to require operators of facilities with public restrooms who allow transgender people to use restrooms consistent with their gender identity to post a vividly colored large notice at the entrance to the restroom warning people about that policy.  The law went into effect on July 1.  On July 9, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger issued a preliminary injunction banning its enforcement while a lawsuit challenges its constitutionality in Bongo Productions v. Lawrence, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 128262 (M.D. Tenn., July 9, 2021).

Despite the lack of any reported incidents in Tennessee of problems due to transgender peoples’ public restroom usage, the Republican-controlled legislature, firmly enlisted in the current “red state” war against transgender people, passed H.B. 1182/S.B. 1224, which amends the state’s zoning laws regulating public property, to provide that any “public or private entity or business that operates a building or facility open to the general public and that, as a matter of formal or informal policy, allows a member of either biological sex to use any public restroom within the building or facility shall post notice of the policy at the entrance of each public restroom in the building or facility.”

The law requires that the notice be posted “in a manner that is easily visible to a person entering the public restroom” and must be “at least eight inches wide and six inches tall” with a red and yellow color scheme designed to attract notice, and must use the precise wording specified in the statute, with its reference to “biological sex.”

The ACLU represents Bongo Productions, a Nashville company that operates several coffeehouses and restaurants, one of which has a particular LGBT clientele and which employs several transgender people, and Sanctuary Performing Arts, which is described as “a performing arts venue, community center and safe haven located in Chattanooga” which was “founded by member of the transgender community” and which intends to operate a full-service café and thus will come under the requirements of the new law.  Both Bongo and Sanctuary already provide multi-user restrooms.  Under the zoning laws long in effect prior to the present controversy, any multiple-user restrooms have to be labeled for men or for women by words or symbols.  Sanctuary has not labeled their restrooms by gender, but will be required to do so once they open the full-service café.

The owners of these facilities argued that the new law unconstitutionally compels them to post signs and communicate messages that they object to and that many of their customers will object to.  They presented expert testimony on the unscientific and ambiguous terminology of the statute, with its reference to “biological sex,” which was sufficient to persuade Judge Trauger, who devoted several paragraphs of her opinion to the testimony of a professor from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor, who explained the complexities of human sexuality.  What seemed to most impress Judge Trauger was the evidence that asking a transgender man who is presenting as a man to use the women’s room or a transgender woman who is presenting as a woman to use the men’s room was likely to cause quite a commotion, exactly the kind of social disruption that the proponents of the legislation claim to be trying to forestall by the prescribed notices.

In order to get a preliminary injunction, plaintiffs have to show that they have standing to sue, that the controversy is ripe for judicial resolution, that they have a reasonable probability of winning their case on the merits, that they will suffer irreparable injury if the act is enforced and the government will not suffer irreparable injury if enforcement is blocked while the case is being litigated.

Judge Trauger was convinced that all the criteria were met, despite disingenuous arguments by the lawyers for the public officials who are being sued, the fire marshalls in charge of Codes enforcement and local district attorneys who would be responsible for enforcement activity.

Her opinion is really a delight to read.  For example, on the issue of standing, they argued that nobody had brought an enforcement action against the plaintiffs, and one of the local D.A.’s even told the press that he didn’t intend to enforce the statute.  “This might be quite a different case if each of the defendant officials had given the court a meaningful reason to expect that he will not enforce the Act,” she wrote.  “The defendants, however, seek to have it both ways – to pretend that no one knows how the Act will be enforced, despite the fact that, of course, they know, because they will be among the ones doing the enforcing, and they are simply keeping their plans to themselves.”  In a footnote, she noted that a Republican legislator had sought an opinion from the state’s attorney general about whether D.A. Funk could be subjected to disciplinary action or removal “for his apparent disinclination to enforce the Act” after news reports appeared stating that he would not enforce it.

As to the merits of the case, since the statute compels business owners to post signs with which they disagree, this is a content-based regulation of speech subject to strict scrutiny, which means the statute is presumed unconstitutional unless the state has a compelling interest and the law is narrowly tailored to avoid unnecessarily abridging freedom of speech.

Judge Trauger wrote that “there is simply no basis whatsoever for concluding that the Act is narrowly tailored to serve any compelling governmental purpose.  Although at least one key supporter of the Act in the General Assembly justified its requirements in relation to supposed risks of sexual assault and rape, there is (1) no evidence, in either the legislative record or the record in this case, that there is any problem of individuals’ abusing private bathroom policies intended to accommodate transgender and intersex individuals for that purpose and (2) no reason to think that, if such a problem existed, the mandated signs would address it.”

Even if there was a legitimate interest to “let patrons of a business know its bathroom policies – which the court finds doubtful – then that purpose could still be served by simply requiring businesses to disclose that information when asked or to keep it filed away somewhere accessible,” wrote the judge.  “There would certainly be no need to dictate the precise language required for the notice, the precise size and location of the disclosure, or that the sign have a red-and-yellow, warning-sign color scheme, as if to say: ‘Look Out: Dangerous Gender Expressions Ahead,’” concluding that there is “no plausible argument that this law would come anywhere close to surviving strict scrutiny.”

She also rejected the argument that the sign, which does not use the terms transgender or gender identity, was merely communicating non-controversial information.  “Courts, when considering First Amendment challenges, are permitted to exercise ordinary common sense to evaluate the content of a message in context to consider its full meaning, rather than simply robotically reading the message’s text for plausible deniability,” she wrote, asserting that “of course the signs required by the Act are statements about the nature of sex and gender and the role of transgender individuals in society.  Justice is blind, but the court does not have to play dumb.”

“On the current record,” wrote the judge, “the only way to argue that the message mandated by the Act is uncontroversial is to argue that the plaintiffs are simply lying about both the social realities they have observed and their own disagreement with the required message.  But the court sees no evidence whatsoever that the plaintiffs have failed to tell the truth about that or anything else.  To the contrary, the legislative history of the Act shows that it was devised, quite consciously and explicitly, as a direct response to social and political trends involving transgender people.  It is only now, in the context of litigation, that officials of the State suggest otherwise.”

The court concluded that the plaintiffs would suffer irreparable injury – a violation of their constitutional rights and potential harm to their businesses and the community they serve – if the public officials are free to enforce the statute.  “Because the plaintiffs’ evidence shows that the Act would be an invasion on private communities’ power to define themselves and their norms in accordance with their own consciences, the plaintiffs have more than carried their burden of showing that irreparable harm would occur absent an injunction.”  And, given the patent unconstitutionality of the statute, an injunction would not irreparably harm the state or damage the public interest.  “No legislature can enact a law it lacks the power to enact,” wrote Trager, “and the constraints on Tennessee’s power that come along with the U.S. Constitution were voluntarily assumed by the State of Tennessee by virtue of its entry into the federal system.”

She labelled the law a “brazen violation” of the concept that public officials cannot “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”  She ordered defendants to “take no actions to enforce House Bill 1182/Senate Bill 1224.

Those who followed the campaign for marriage equality some years ago may remember that it was Judge Trauger, who was appointed to the Court by President Bill Clinton, who issued an order in 2014 that the state must recognize the same-sex marriage performed out of state for plaintiffs in an important marriage equality case.  She correctly predicted in her opinion then that the Supreme Court would eventually recognize a constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples.

 

 

Federal Court Enjoins HHS & EEOC From Requiring Catholic Plaintiffs to Perform or Provide Gender Transition Services

Posted on: January 23rd, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

Ruling on the last full day of the Trump Administration, one of the federal trial judges appointed by the outgoing president ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bars the federal government from enforcing the non-discrimination requirement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Section 1557 or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against Catholic plaintiffs to require them either to fund or perform gender transition procedures.  Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Azar, 2021 WL 191009, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9156 (D.N.D., January 19, 2021).  Chief Judge Peter D. Welte denied summary judgment to co-plaintiff the State of North Dakota, which sought a declaration that it is not required to provide such procedures in its state health institutions or to its employees or through its Medicaid program, and found that the Plaintiffs lacked standing on their claims concerning performance of abortions and sterilizations, as the court found that various provisions of the ACA and other federal laws already relieved them of obligations in that regard.

Judge Welte issued his opinion just a few days after hearing oral argument on the summary judgment motions, but the case has been pending for a long time and it is likely that he had most of the lengthy, analytical opinion drafted well in advance of the argument, on the basis of the suit papers.

The case was complicated by the history of the federal government’s positions on the issue in question, which changed to the extent of the Trump Administration withdrawing an Obama Administration regulation from  2016 and replacing it with a new regulation, formally announced just days before the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision.  In Bostock, 140 S. Ct. 1731 (June 15, 2020), the Court determined that Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex necessarily extended to claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation and transgender status.

The final regulation announced days before Bostock acknowledged that the case had been argued and indicated that its outcome could affect the scope of the ACA’s non-discrimination requirement.  In its explanatory Prologue to the regulation, HHS reiterated the Trump Administration’s view – presented to the Court in Bostock by the Solicitor General – that discrimination because of sex does not encompass discrimination because of gender identity.  Confident that they were going to win, their new regulation, intended to supplant the Obama Administration’s regulation, removed the earlier regulation’s definition of “sex” so that it no longer specified “gender identity.”  They went ahead and officially published the new regulation as previously schedule in the Federal Register a few days after Bostock was decided, making no effort to delay publication in order to take account of that decision.  The result was peculiar: a regulation formally published just days after a Supreme Court decision that admittedly could affect the substance of the regulation, but utterly failing to grapple with that effect.

The Trump Administration’s brazen decision to go ahead with final publication without taking Bostock into account persuaded several other federal district courts to conclude that the final regulation’s definition of sex violated the Administrative Procedure Act as being inconsistent with the ACA statute’s non-discrimination requirement and/or because it was adopted arbitrarily by failing to consider the Bostock decision.  Other district courts have also criticized HHS’s assertion in the regulation that Title IX’s religious entity exemption was relevant to the ACA, inasmuch as the ACA’s non-discrimination provision specifies that entities covered by it were subject to the kinds of discrimination prohibited by Title IX, which exempts religious schools from its sex discrimination requirements.  The Trump Administration had also persisted in rejecting arguments that Bostock’s interpretation of Title VII necessarily applied to Title IX and other federal sex discrimination laws.

The day after Judge Welte issued his decision, President Biden included among his first Executive Orders one instructing the Executive Branch to apply Bostock to all federal sex discrimination laws.  While EO’s are not interpretively binding on the courts, they are binding on how Executive Branch agencies interpret and enforce their statutory mandates, so the new leadership in HHS and, eventually, the EEOC (where the president gets to appoint one new member of the Commission each year, relatively quickly tipping the balance to the new Administration’s viewpoint regarding the definition of sex discrimination.

But that is neither here nor there regarding the central question in this case, at least as framed by Judge Welte in response to the Catholic plaintiffs, which is whether the government is precluded from enforcing any such non-discrimination requirement against the plaintiffs according to their religiously-based objections, in light of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In Bostock, Justice Neil Gorsuch referred to RFRA as a “super statute” that may override non-discrimination requirements of Title VII (and by extension Title VII and the ACA) in an “appropriate case.”  Is this such an appropriate case?  That turns on whether application of the non-discrimination requirement imposes a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion by the Catholic plaintiffs, in which case Judge Welte characterizes the level of judicial review to be applied to the government’s policy as “strict scrutiny” such that the policy can only be applied if it is the least intrusive way to achieve a compelling government interest.

The court found that “compliance with the challenged laws would violate the Catholic Plaintiffs’ religious beliefs as they sincerely understand them. . .  In meticulous detail, the Catholic Plaintiffs have explained that their religious beliefs regarding human sexuality and procreation prevent them from facilitating gender transitions through either medical services or insurance coverage.”

As to the compelling interest test, the court found that the Defendants “never attempt to make that showing here.”  Of course, Defendants are the Trump Administration’s HHS (for the ACA) and EEOC (for Title VII).  The rule HHS published in June 2020 “conceded to lacking a ‘compelling interest in forcing the provision, or coverage, of these medically controversial [gender-transition] services by covered entities.’”  By contrast, of course, when the Obama Administration opined on this in 2016, HHS specified a compelling interest in ensuring nondiscriminatory access to healthcare, and the EEOC asserted a compelling interest in ensuring non-discriminatory employee benefits plans.  But Judge Welte noted Supreme Court authority that those interests are stated at too high a level of generality to meet the RFRA test, directing courts to “scrutinize the asserted harm of granting specific exemptions to particular religious claimants and to look to the marginal interest in enforcing the challenged government action in that particular context.”  Responding to this command, wrote Welte, “Neither HHS nor the EEOC has articulated how granting specific exemptions for the Catholic Plaintiffs will harm the asserted interests in preventing discrimination. . .  In short, the Court harbors serious doubts that a compelling interest exists.  This issue need not be resolved, however,” he continued, “because the Defendants fail to meet the rigors of the least-restrictive-means test.”

The “least-restrictive means” test is the third part of the RFRA analysis.  Even if the government’s interest is compelling, the question is whether there is a way to achieve that interest without burdening the free exercise rights of the plaintiffs.  Is requiring Catholic entities to perform or finance gender transition the “only feasible means to achieve its compelling interest,” asks the court.  Here, resorting to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby case, Welte suggests that “the most straightforward way of doing this would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing gender transition procedures for those unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.” And, he opined, “if broadening access to gender-transition procedures themselves is the goal, then ‘the government could assist transgender individuals in finding and paying for transition procedures available from the growing number of healthcare providers who offer and specialize in those services,’”  quoting Franciscan Alliance, a decision from the Northern District of Texas that had preliminarily enjoined the government from bringing enforcement actions under Section 1557 against religious objectors.  (That injunction was dissolved when the Trump Administration indicated to that court that it did not intend to enforce Section 1557 against religious objectors and would replace the 2016 Obama Administration regulation with one that did not require such coverage.) And, said the court, the Defendants had not shown that “these alternatives are infeasible.”

Thus, the court granted summary judgment and issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of Sec. 1557 or Title VII against the Catholic Plaintiffs in this case.  The court did not issue a nationwide injunction, however, limiting its injunction to the plaintiff organizations in this case, and as noted finding that the state of North Dakota did not have standing on these questions, rejecting its Spending Clause argument that the government was wrongly coercing the state to fund gender transition through the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

It is worth noting that this litigation was not brought on by an actual case of a transgender individual seeking gender transition services from a Catholic health care organization, or the employee of a Catholic entity challenging the failure of the employer’s health insurance to cover the procedures, or in response to a challenge to the state’s failure to cover these procedures for its employees or Medicaid participants.  This was affirmative litigation brought by the state and the Catholic plaintiffs preemptively, seeking to establish judicial cover for their discriminatory policies.  As such, and significantly, the interests of transgender people were not directly represented in this case although the ACLU participated as amicus curiae.   (Curiously, the Westlaw report of the case did not list the ACLU among counsel, but the Lexis report did as of January 23 when this account was written.)  The Plaintiffs were represented by the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and private counsel for several of the Catholic institutional plaintiffs.  The government (i.e., the Trump Administration) was represented by the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for North Dakota, which of course was happy to let the Plaintiffs win in light of the Administration’s position opposing the Bostock ruling and their issuance of the 2020 Regulation (which the court could plausibly have found mooted the case, were it not for the fact that he was ruling the day before President Biden was to be inaugurated).  Now it is up to the Biden Administration to take over and appeal this decision to the 8th Circuit, in light of the President’s January 20 Executive Order.

Gavin Grimm Victorious: U.S. Appeals Court Reject’s School Board’s Anti-Trans Restroom Policy

Posted on: August 29th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

Capping litigation that began in 2015, a three-judge panel of the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled by a vote of 2-1 on August 26 that the Gloucester County (Virginia) School Board violated the statutory and constitutional rights of Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy, when it denied him the use of boys’ restrooms at Gloucester County High School.  Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 27234, 2020 Westlaw 5034430.

This may sound like old news, especially since other federal appellate courts, most notably the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit, the Chicago-based 7th Circuit, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit and the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, have either ruled in favor of the rights of transgender students or rejected arguments against such equal access policies by protesting parents and cisgender students. But Grimm’s victory is particularly delicious because the Trump Administration intervened at a key point in the litigation to switch sides in the case after the Obama Administration had supported Grimm’s original lawsuit.

Grimm, identified as female at birth, claimed his male gender identity by the end of his freshman year, taking on a male name and dressing and grooming as male. Before his sophomore year, he and his mother spoke to the high school principal and secured agreement that he could use boys’ bathrooms, which he did for several weeks without incident.  But as word spread that a transgender boy was using the facilities, parents became alarmed and deluged the school board with protests, leading to two stormy public meetings and a vote that transgender students in the district (of which Grimm was then the only known one) were restricted to using a single-occupant restroom in the nurse’s office or restrooms consistent with their “biological sex,” which the district defined as the sex identified at birth.

After Grimm filed his lawsuit represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeking a court order to allow him to resume using the boys’ restrooms in his school, the Obama Administration weighed in with a letter to the court siding with Grimm’s argument that the school board’s policy violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans sex discrimination against students.  Despite this positive letter, the district judge granted the school board’s motion to dismiss the Title IX claim, reserving judgment on Grimm’s alternative claim under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Grimm appealed the dismissal.  A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit then ruled that the district court should have deferred to the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX and not dismissed that claim.  The school board sought review from the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted the petition and scheduled the case for argument in March 2017.  The timing of this argument guaranteed that Grimm would never get to use the boys’ restrooms at the high school before graduating that spring.

After the Trump Administration took office in January 2017, the Justice and Education Departments announced that they were “withdrawing” the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX.  Without taking a formal position on the interpretive question, they criticized the Obama Administration as inadequately reasoned.  But subsequently, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his disagreement with the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX and more generally the prior administration’s position that transgender people are protected by all federal laws banning sex discrimination.  In an October 2017 memorandum to all executive agencies, Sessions announced that laws banning sex discrimination apply only narrowly to a claim that an individual suffered discrimination because he was a biological male or she was a biological female, defined by how they were identified at birth.

Since the 4th Circuit had premised its reversal of the dismissal of Grimm’s Title IX claim on its conclusion that the district court should have deferred to the Obama Administration’s interpretation, the basis for that ruling was effectively gone.  The Solicitor General formally notified the Supreme Court, which cancelled the scheduled hearing, vacated the 4th Circuit’s decision, and sent the case back to the District Court without any ruling by the Supreme Court.  In the interim, the district court had responded to the 4th Circuit’s decision by issuing an injunction requiring the school board to let Grimm use the boys’ restrooms, but that was stayed while the appeal was pending in the Supreme Court and within months of the Supreme Court’s action of March 2017, Grimm had graduated from high school.

The Gloucester County School Board than urged the district court to dismiss the case as moot, since Grimm was no longer a student.  Grimm insisted that the case should continue, because he should be entitled to seek damages for the discrimination he suffered and he wanted to be able to use the male facilities if he returned to the school as an alumnus to attend events there.  The mootness battle raged for some time, the complaint was amended to reflect the new reality that Grimm was no longer a student, and a new issue emerged when Grimm requested that the school issue him an appropriate transcript in his male name identifying him as male, since he was stuck in the odd situation of being a boy with a high school transcript identifying him as a girl.  By this time, he had gotten a court order approving his name change and a new birth certificate, but the school persisted in denying him a new transcript, raising frivolous arguments about the validity of the new birth certificate.

Thus repurposed, the case went forward.  Ultimately the district court ruled in Grimm’s favor on both his statutory and constitutional claims, but the school board was not willing to settle the case, appealing again to the 4th Circuit.  The August 26, 2020, ruling is the result.

The ACLU publicized this case heavily from the beginning, winning national media attention and an army of amicus parties filing briefs in support of Grimm’s claim along the away.  On May 26, 2020, the case was argued in the 4th Circuit before a panel of two Obama appointees, Judge Henry Floyd and Judge James A. Wynn, Jr., and an elderly George H.W. Bush appointee, Judge Paul Niemeyer (who had dissented from the original 4th Circuit ruling in this case).  In light of the rulings by other courts of appeals on transgender student cases and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, on June 25, 2020, holding that discrimination because of transgender status is discrimination “because of sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the result in this new ruling was foreordained.

Judge Floyd’s opinion for the panel, and Judge Wynn’s concurring opinion, both go deeply into the factual and legal issues in the case, constituting a sweeping endorsement of the right of transgender students to equal treatment in schools that receive federal funding, a prerequisite for coverage under Title IX.  Furthermore, public schools are bound by the Equal Protection Clause, and the court’s ruling on the constitutional claim was just as sweeping.

The court first rejected the school board’s argument that the case was moot, with Grimm having graduated and now being enrolled in college.  Since damages are available for a violation of Title IX, it was irrelevant that Grimm was no longer a student.  He had been barred from using the boys’ restrooms for most of his sophomore and all of his junior and senior years.  Even though the district court granted him only nominal damages, his claim for damages made this a live controversy, as did the school’s continuing refusal to issue him a proper transcript, which the court held was also illegal.

Turning to the merits, Judge Floyd first tackled the Equal Protection claim.  The court rejected the School Board’s argument that there was no discrimination against Grimm because he was not “similarly situated” to cisgender boys.  Judges Floyd and Wynn firmly asserted that Grimm is a boy entitled to be treated as a boy, regardless of his sex as identified at birth.  This judicial endorsement of the reality of gender identity is strongly set forth in both opinions.

Judge Niemeyer’s dissent rests on a Title IX regulation, which Grimm did not challenge, providing that schools could maintain separate single-sex facilities for male and female students, and the judge’s rejection that Grimm is male for purposes of this regulation.  Niemeyer insisted that Title IX only prohibits discrimination because of “biological sex” (a term with the statute does not use).  As far as he was concerned, the school did all that the statute required it to do when it authorized Grimm to use the nurse’s restroom or the girls’ restrooms.  But the majority of the panel accepted Grimm’s argument that the school’s policy subjected him to discriminatory stigma, as well as imposing physical disadvantages.  As a boy, he would not be welcome in the girls’ restroom, and the nurse’s restroom was too far from the classrooms for a break between classes.  As a result, he generally avoided using the restroom at school, leaving to awkward situations and urinary tract infections.

As the case unfolded, the school constructed additional single-user restrooms open to all students regardless of sex and made some modifications to the existing restrooms to increase the privacy of users, but the single-user restrooms were not conveniently located and cisgender students did not use them, reinforcing the stigma Grimm experienced.  Stigma due to discrimination has long been recognized by the federal courts as the basis for a constitutional equal protection claim.

The school’s actions undermined Judge Niemeyer’s argument that the school board policy was justified by the need to protect the privacy of cisgender students, an argument that has been specifically rejected by the 3rd and 9th Circuit cases when they rejected cases brought by parents and cisgender students challenging school policies that allowed transgender students to use appropriate restrooms.  Judge Niemeyer colorfully wrote, “we want to be alone — to have our privacy — when we ‘shit, shower, shave, shampoo, and shine.’”  (Do high school buys shave in the boys’ room as a general practice?)  But the panel smajority was not persuaded that it was necessary to exclude Grimm from the boys’ restrooms to achieve this goal.  After all, the only way Grimm as a transgender boy could relieve himself was by using an enclosed stall, lacking the physical equipment to use a urinal, so he would not be disrobing in front of the other students.  (Let’s be real here.)

Judge Floyd’s opinion did not rely on the Bostock ruling for its constitutional analysis, instead noting that many circuit courts of appeals have accepted the argument that government policies discriminating because of gender identity are subject to heightened scrutiny, and are thus presumptively unconstitutional unless they substantially advance an important state interest.  The majority, contrary to judge Floyd, did not think that excluding Grimm advanced an important state interest, especially after the School Board had altered the restrooms to afford more privacy, an obvious solution to any privacy issue.

Turning to the statutory claim, Judge Floyd pointed out that judicial interpretation of Title IX has always been informed by the Supreme Court’s Title VII rulings on sex discrimination, so the Bostock decision carried heavy precedential weight and the school board’s arguments on the constitutional claim were no more successful on this claim.  The School Board lacked a sufficient justification under Title IX to impose unequal access to school facilities on Grimm.

At this point, the Gloucester County School Board can read the writing on the wall and concede defeat, or it can petition the 4th Circuit for en banc review (review by the full 15-judge bench of the circuit court), or it can seek Supreme Court review a second time.  As to the en banc situation, the 4th Circuit is one of the few remaining federal circuit courts with a majority of Democratic appointees, as several of Bill Clinton’s appointees are still serving as active judges and all six of Obama’s appointees are still serving, leaving a majority of Democratic appointees on the full bench, so seeking en banc review, which requires that a majority of the active judges vote to review the case, would be a long shot.

On the other hand, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s decision for the Supreme Court in Bostock refrained from deciding – since it wasn’t an issue in that case – whether excluding transgender people from restroom facilities violates sex discrimination laws, and this case would provide a vehicle for addressing that issue.  It takes only four votes on the Supreme Court to grant review of a lower court case, so there may be another chapter in the saga of Grimm’s legal battle. It is also possible that the St. Johns County School District in Florida, which lost in the 11th Circuit in a virtually identical ruling, might also seek Supreme Court review, so one way or another, this issue may yet get on to the Court’s Docket this term or next.

ACLU attorney Joshua Block has been representing Grimm throughout the struggle, but the case was argued in May by cooperating attorney David Patrick Corrigan, a litigation specialist at the Richmond firm of Harman Clayton Corrigan & Wellman.  A local Richmond firm represented the School Board, confronting Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring supporting Grimm with an amicus brief.  The overwhelming majority of amicus briefs filed, many by state attorneys general, sided with Grimm.

Second Round of Briefing in LGBT Title VII Cases Before the Supreme Court Completed During August

Posted on: September 7th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

On October 8, the second day of hearings in the Supreme Court’s October 2019 Term, the Court will hear arguments in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Case No. 17-1618, and Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda, Case No. 17-1623, appeals from the 11th and 2nd Circuits on the question whether sexual orientation discrimination claims are actionable as sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Aimee Stephens, Case No. 18-107, an appeal from the 6th Circuit on the question whether gender identity discrimination claims are actionable as sex discrimination under Title VII.  The Court consolidated the two sexual orientation discrimination cases, in which the plaintiff-employee is appealing in Bostock and the defendant-employer is appealing in Altitude Express, for a single argument of one hour.  The argument in Harris Funeral Homes, in which the employer is appealing, will be argued next.  Transcripts of the arguments will be posted on the Supreme Court’s website shortly after each argument has concluded (usually within an hour or two), and links to audio recordings of the arguments will be made available on the Court’s website later in the week.

Harris Funeral Homes presents an unusual situation; the victorious party in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), is represented in the Supreme Court by the Solicitor General, who, reflecting the change of administration since the original complaint in this case was filed by the EEOC, is now joining with the employer to ask the Court to reverse the 6th Circuit.  The only party defending the 6th Circuit’s decision is the charging party in the EEOC proceeding, transgender funeral director Aimee Stephens, who intervened as a co-appellant in the 6th Circuit, is named as a Respondent in Harris Funeral Homes’ cert. petition, and is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Harris Funeral Homes is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the conservative religious litigation group that is a frequent litigant opposing LGBT rights in the courts.

For purposes of briefing, the Court decided to treat all the employee-plaintiffs in the three cases as if they were Petitioners (although only Bostock is a Petitioner in the Supreme Court), and the three employer-defendants as if they were Respondents (even though two of them are actually Petitioners).  Thus, the first round of briefing, which was concluded early in July, consisted of the main briefs for Gerald Bostock, the Estate of Donald Zarda, and Aimee Stephens, and the amicus briefs (more than 40) filed in support of their claims that Title VII does extend to sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination claims.  The second round of briefing, which concluded during August, consisted of the briefs for the three employers – Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express; and Harris Funeral Homes; and the EEOC, which is technically a respondent even though the government, as such, is now siding with the Petitioner.

Interestingly, despite earnest efforts by the Solicitor General’s Office, the EEOC’s General Counsel, who would ordinarily be a signatory on the brief purporting to represent their agency, did not join in the submission of the government’s brief, since as of the date of filing the EEOC had not disavowed its position that gender identity discrimination claims are covered by Title VII.  Indeed, the amicus brief filed by the Solicitor General in the sexual orientation cases on behalf of the employer also lacked the EEOC’s signature, since the agency that enforces Title VII (and whose interpretation of the statute is entitled to judicial deference, under existing precedents), has not disavowed its position (argued as an agency amicus in the 2nd Circuit) that Title VII covers sexual orientation claims.  Quite a tangle for the Supreme Court to confront. During oral argument of Zarda v. Altitude Express in the 2nd Circuit, the en banc bench reflected some puzzlement and bemusement about being confronted with a lawyer from the S.G.’s office and a lawyer from the EEOC arguing against each other.

Simultaneously with the filing of the government’s brief, the Solicitor General filed a request that argument time be divided evenly (15 minutes each) between the Solicitor General’s office and ADF, counsel for Harris Funeral Homes.

Law Notes gave an overview of the first round of filings in our August 2019 issue.  Herewith is a brief summary of the second round of filings.

Altitude Express’s brief was signed by Saul D. Zabell, Counsel of Record who has represented the company throughout this litigation, and Ryan T. Biesenbach of Zabell & Collotta, P.C., a Bohemia, N.Y., law firm.  It predictably argues that the meaning of Title VII must be its “original public meaning” – the meaning that members of the public would attribute to the statutory language when it was enacted by Congress in 1964.  The brief claims that the Supreme Court has never interpreted Title VII in a manner that “conflicts” with “the original public meaning of ‘sex’.”  It also describes as “wrong” the various legal theories offered by Bostock for construing “sex” to include “gender identity.”  It argues that subsequent legislative developments – the repeated introduction of bills to amend federal anti-discrimination law to add “sexual orientation” that have never achieved enactment, as well as the enactment of some other statutes that use ‘sexual orientation’ such as the Hate Crimes Law – show Congress’s understanding that the term must be used to address such discrimination, noting also that after the EEOC and several lower federal courts had rejected sexual orientation discrimination claims in the early period of Title VII’s history, Congress passed a package of amendments to Title VII in 1991 but did not overrule any of those rulings legislatively.  The brief also rejects certain other arguments that some lower court judges had accepted as reasons for extending Title VII to cover sexual orientation claims.  None of these arguments was new or unanticipated, and they were all rejected in one way or another not only in the 2nd Circuit (en banc) but also in the 7th Circuit (en banc) in 2017 in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, a case where the employer decided not to seek Supreme Court review.

Clayton County’s brief (Bostock), signed by Counsel of Record Jack R. Hancock and other attorneys from the Forest Park, Georgia, law firm of Freeman Mathis & Gary LLP, carries the same argument headings as Altitude Express’s brief.  Indeed, they appear to be a joint product, making identical arguments.

The main brief that drew most of the press commentary when it was filed, of course, was the Solicitor General’s brief, on which S.G. Noel J. Francisco is Counsel of Record.  The other signatories are attorneys in the Solicitor General’s office and main Justice Department.  As noted above, and deemed newsworthy, no attorneys from the EEOC signed this brief which is presented as the brief of the Federal Respondent (which, technically, is the EEOC).   The brief urges the Court to adopt a narrow interpretation of key Title VII Supreme Court precedents on which the EEOC had relied in the 6th Circuit, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins and Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, contending that the 6th Circuit had extended them beyond their holdings to reach the conclusion that allowing gender identity discrimination claims is consistent with Supreme Court precedent.  Most of the arguments in the brief are variants of one or more of the arguments in the Altitude Express and Clayton County briefs, effectively countering the EEOC’s justifications for applying Title VII to gender identity claims in Macy v. Holder, EEOC Doc. 0120120821, 2012 WL 1435995 (2012).  Even though the EEOC has not overruled Macy, it is anticipated that it may do so in due course as the new majority resulting from Trump’s appointments to the Commission either rules on a federal sector gender identity discrimination case, proposes a new regulatory interpretation, or takes a position in litigation in the lower federal courts embracing a change of position.  The Commission could just instruct its regional offices to dismiss gender identity claims on jurisdictional grounds, similar to the action of the U.S. Department of Education which now refuses to process gender identity discrimination claims under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

The brief on behalf of Harris Funeral Homes, submitted by Alliance Defending Freedom, attracted comparatively little attention, with the Solicitor General being the “elephant in the room.”  Mainstream press coverage clearly sees Harris as part of the Trump Administration’s overall opposition to transgender rights as part of its systemic attempt to reverse the civil rights positions taken by the Obama Administration. Clearly, the president feels that he was elected to overturn everything that the Obama Administration did, if possible.  This was certainly reflected in his transgender military service ban and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ October 2017 memorandum disavowing the Obama Administration’s positions on both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination.

Beginning on August 16 and extending through August 23, the Supreme Court clerk added to the docket forty amicus briefs supporting Harris Funeral Homes’ (and the Solicitor General’s) position that Title VII does not extend to gender identity discrimination claims.  Some were from the “usual suspects” familiar to anybody who had scanned the amicus lists in Obergefell and Windsor, the cases concerning marriage equality.  They include states whose anti-discrimination laws do not cover gender identity, Republican members of Congress, companies that don’t want to be forced to employ transgender people, individual legal scholars, polemicists, think tanks and policy institutes, and, of course, religious entities that argue that requiring employers to accommodate transgender people excessively burdens their religious freedom.  (In Harris, the owner of the funeral homes stated his religious beliefs as a justification for his refusal to continue employing the plaintiff after she wrote to him about her gender transition. As a result of this, the district court ruled in favor of Harris Funeral Homes in reliance on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, employing an interpretation subsequently rejected by the 6th Circuit.  Surprisingly, in light of its religious freedom orientation, ADF did not include in its cert petition a question about the application of the RFRA to this case, so technically the religious arguments made by many of the amici are not pertinent to the questions on which cert was granted.

Particular press attention was drawn to briefs of some feminist groups who are particularly perturbed about any legal recognition of transgender women, making arguments that fall far outside the mainstream of the professional medical and mental health communities about the nature of human sexuality, contending that transgender women are men in drag who should not be given admission to women-only spaces and should not be accorded the treatment under anti-discrimination law that has been accorded to women.  Vox.com devoted a lengthy article to explaining the opposition of some feminist groups to transgender rights.  See Katelyn Burns, The Rise of Anti-Trans ‘Radical’ Feminists, Explained” (posted September 5, 2019).

Also during August, 24 amicus briefs (including one from the Solicitor General, as the federal government is not a party in the sexual orientation cases) were filed in support of the employers in the sexual orientation discrimination cases, Bostock and Altitude Express.  Of course, the EEOC’s legal staff is not represented among the signers of the Solicitor General’s amicus brief, again a newsworthy absence denoting that at least as of the time when briefs were due, the agency had not abandoned its position in Baldwin v. Foxx, EEOC No. 0120133080, 2015 WL 4397641 (2015), that Title VII covers sexual orientation discrimination claims.  Many of these amicus briefs were noted as addressing all three pending Title VII cases and thus were also filed and counted among the Harris Funeral Home amicus briefs.  When it announced the filing schedule, the Court also directed that amicus briefs for the Altitude Express case were to be filed on the Bostock docket. The same mix of amici that one finds on the Harris Funeral Homes docket generally show up on the Bostock list, minus those groups who have a specific focus on opposing transgender rights.  The arguments in the amicus briefs are similar as well, although, of course, the argument that gender is identified at birth is permanent and not changeable is absent here, while it predominates in many of the amicus briefs filed in Harris Funeral Homes.

Several of these amicus briefs emanate from groups that may have been formed for the specific purpose of filing amicus briefs in these cases.  All of the docketed amicus briefs can be examined on the Supreme Court’s website, where they are available to be downloaded in pdf format.

The deadline for the third round of briefing set by the Court is September 16, when Reply Briefs can be filed, responding to the briefs that were filed in August.  Reply briefs, if any, will be reported in the October issue of Law Notes.

Federal Court Rules for Gavin Grimm in Long-Running Virginia Transgender Bathroom Case

Posted on: August 10th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

After more than four years of litigation, there is finally a ruling on the merits in Gavin Grimm’s transgender rights lawsuit against the Gloucester County (Virginia) School Board.  On August 9, U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen granted Grimm’s motion for summary judgment, finding that the school district violated his rights under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by refusing to let the transgender boy use the boys’ restroom facilities while he was attending Gloucester High School and by refusing to update his official school transcript to conform to the “male” designation on his amended birth certificate.  Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, 2019 WL 3774118 (E.D. Va., Aug. 9, 2019).

In addition to awarding Grimm a symbolic damage recovery of $1.00, the court issued a permanent injunction requiring the School Board to update Grimm’s official records and provide “legitimate copies of such records” to Grimm by August 19.  Judge Wright Allen also ordered that the Board “shall pay Mr. Grimm’s reasonable costs and attorneys’ fees” in an amount to be determined.  In light of the length and complexity of this lawsuit, the fee award is likely to be substantial.

Grimm began his freshman year at Gloucester High School in 2013 listed as a girl on enrollment papers, consistent with his original birth certificate.  During spring of his freshman year, Grimm told his parents that he was transgender and he began therapy with Dr. Lisa Griffin, a psychologist experienced in transgender issues, who diagnosed gender dysphoria and put the diagnosis in a letter that Grimm later presented to school officials.  Also in 2014, Grimm legally changed his first name to Gavin and began using the mens’ restrooms “in public venues.”  Prior to the beginning of his sophomore year at Gloucester High, he and his mother met with a school guidance counselor, provided a copy of Dr. Griffin’s letter, and requested that Grimm be treated as a boy at school.

They agreed that Grimm would use the restroom in the nurse’s office, but he found it stigmatizing and inconvenient, making him late for classes.  After a few weeks of this, he met with the guidance counselor and sought permission to use the boys’ restrooms.  The request went up to the school’s principal, Nate Collins, who conferred with the Superintendent of Schools, Walter Clemons, “who offered to support Principal Collins’ final decision,” according to testimony in the court record.  Collins then gave Grimm the go-ahead to use the boys’ bathrooms, which he did for seven weeks without any incident.  Grimm had been given permission to complete his phys ed requirement through an on-line course and never used the boys’ locker room at school.

Word that a transgender boy was using the boys’ restrooms got out in the community and stirred up opposition from “adult members of the community,” who contacted school officials to demand that Grimm be barred from using the boys’ rooms.  The School Board devoted two meetings to the issue, finally voting in December 2014 to adopt a formal policy that the use of restroom and locker room facilities “shall be limited to the corresponding biological genders, and students with gender identity issues shall be provided an alternative appropriate private facility.”

The Board announced that it would construct some single-sex unisex restrooms in the high school, but until then Grimm would have to use the restroom in the nurse’s office.  There eventually were such unisex restrooms, but they were not conveniently located for use between classes and Grimm ended up not using them, finding a requirement to use them as stigmatizing.  Instead, he tried to avoid urinating at school and developed urinary tract infections, as well as suffering psychological trauma.

Meanwhile, at the end of his sophomore year in June 2015, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles issued Grimm a state ID card identifying him as male.  When he need brief hospitalization to deal with thoughts of suicide during his junior year, he was admitted to the boys’ ward at Virginia Commonwealth University’s hospital.  In June 2016, he had top surgery, and on September 9, 2016, the Gloucester County Circuit Court ordered the Health Department to issue him a new birth certificate listing him as male, referring to his surgery as “gender reassignment surgery” even though it did not involve genital alteration.  In October 2016, Grimm presented a photocopy of his new birth certificate to the school, but they refused to update his records to reflect male status, and his transcripts still identify him as female.

Grimm, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed his lawsuit on June 11, 2015, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Norfolk.  The case was assigned to Senior District Judge Robert G. Doumar, who quickly granted the school district’s motion to dismiss the Title IX claim and reserved judgment on Grimm’s constitutional claim while Grimm appealed the dismissal.  The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal, relying on an interpretation of Title IX endorsed by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice during the Obama Administration, and sent the case back to Judge Doumar, who issued a preliminary injunction on June 23, 2016, requiring the School Board to let Grimm use the boys’ restrooms.  Conveniently for the school board, this order came at the end of the school year, so they had several months of summer break to try to forestall having to let Grimm use the boys’ restroom when school resumed.  Although the 4th Circuit quickly turned down the Board’s motion to stay the injunction, an emergency application to the Supreme Court was granted on August 3, 2016, pending the filing of a petition for review by the School Board and guaranteeing that Grimm was unlikely to be able to use the boys’ restrooms during his senior year if review was granted by the Supreme Court.

Ultimately, the Board did filed its appeal, which was granted with argument set to take place in March 2017.  This timing would virtually guarantee that Grimm would not be able to use the boys’ restrooms at the high school before his graduation, since a case argued in March would not likely result in an opinion being issued until June.  Elections and fate intervened as well, as the new Trump Administration moved to “withdraw” the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX, on which the 4th Circuit had relied.  The Solicitor General advised the Supreme Court of this withdrawal and the Court took the case off the hearing calendar and sent it back to the 4th Circuit, which in turn sent it back to the district court.  Judge Doumar having retired, the case was reassigned to Judge Wright Allen.

Since Grimm had graduated by then, the School Board argued that his request for injunctive relief was moot, as he would no longer be attending Gloucester High School. The ACLU countered that the question of the restroom policy’s lawfulness was not moot, that Grimm as an alumnus would be barred from using the boys’ restroom when he returned to the school for public events, that Grimm was still entitled to a ruling on his claim for damages.  The district court refused to dismiss the case, and discovery went forward.  Although the lawsuit had already been to the 4th Circuit twice and to the Supreme Court, there still had not been any ultimate ruling on the merits of the case at that point.

On May 22, 2018, Judge Wright Allen issued a ruling denying the School Board’s motion to dismiss the case as moot, and she ruled that Grimm had a viable claim of sex discrimination under Title IX.  She also ruled at that time that the constitutional equal protection claim would be decided using “intermediate scrutiny,” which puts to the government the burden to show that its policy substantially advances an important government interest.  On February 19, 2019, the court allowed Grimm to file a new amended complaint adding the issue of the School Board’s refusal to issue a corrected transcript.

On July 23, the court heard arguments on new motions for summary judgment filed by both parties.  These motions were decided by Judge Wright Allen’s August 9 ruling, which also rejected most of the School Board’s objections to various items of evidence offered by Grimm – mainly letters and medical records documenting his gender dysphoria diagnosis and subsequent treatment – which were incorrectly described by the School Board as “expert testimony” that was not admissible through discovery.  The court agreed to the school board’s argument that documents relating to failed settlement discussions should be excluded from consideration.

As to the merits of Grimm’s Title IX claim, the court found that Grimm had been excluded from participation in an education program on the basis of sex when the School Board adopted a policy that would bar him from using the boys’ restrooms at the high school, that the policy harmed Grimm both physically and psychologically, and that because the Gloucester schools receive federal financial assistance, they are subject to Title IX.   Consequently, summary judgment should be granted to Grimm on his Title IX claim.

As to the Equal Protection claim, the court relied on a Supreme Court ruling concerning the exclusion of girls from Virginia Military Institute, in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that in a sex-discrimination case involving “intermediate scrutiny,” the defendant bears the burden of “demonstrating that its proffered justification for its use of the classification is ‘exceedingly persuasive.’”  In this case, the Board’s justification was “an interest in protecting the privacy rights of students, specifically privacy interests that students have in protecting their unclothed bodies.”

Judge Wright Allen found that the Board had made “no showing that the challenged policy is ‘substantially related’ to protection of student privacy.”  She referred to the lack of any student complaints during the seven-week period that Grimm used the boys’ restrooms during his sophomore year and, she wrote, “The Board’s privacy argument also ignores the practical realities of how transgender individuals use a restroom.”  Common sense prevailed, as the judge quoted another trans bathroom court opinion: “When he goes into a restroom, the transgender student enters a stall, closes the door, relieves himself, comes out of the stall, washes his hands, and leaves.”

The Board’s witness at the summary judgment hearing, conceding that there was no privacy concern for other students when a transgender student walks into a stall and shuts the door, testified that “privacy concerns are implicated when students use the urinal, use the toilet, or open their pants to tuck in their shirts.  When asked why the expanded stalls and urinal dividers could not fully address those situations,” wrote the judge, “Mr. Andersen responded that he ‘was sure’ the policy also protected privacy interests in other ways, but that he ‘couldn’t think of any other off the top of his head.’  This court is compelled to conclude that the Board’s privacy argument ‘is based upon sheer conjecture and abstraction,’” this time referring to the 7th Circuit ruling in Ash Whitaker’s trans bathroom case.

Judge Wright Allen also pointed out that although trans high school students have not had genital surgery, if they are taking hormones they are developing secondary sex characteristics of the gender with which they identify.  “If exposure to nudity were a real concern,” she wrote, “forcing such a transgender girl to use male restrooms could likely expose boys to viewing physical characteristics of the opposite sex. From this perspective, the Board’s privacy concerns fail to support the policy it implemented.”

The court concluded that the School Board’s policy must be found unconstitutional, pointing out, in addition, that the Board’s refusal to change the gender indication on Grimm’s school records “implicates no privacy concerns.”  The Board had contended that there were some doubts about the validity of the new birth certificate, because the photocopy they were provided was marked “Void.”  This was explained away by testimony from the government official responsible for issuing the documents.  It seems that all but the original would be marked “Void,” and that Grimm has a valid, authentic birth certificate identifying him as male, which the School Board should have honored.

Judge Wright Allen acknowledged the difficult task the School Board faced in deciding how to proceed during the fall of 2014.  She wrote, “The Board undertook the unenviable responsibility of trying to honor expressions of concern advanced by its constituency as it navigated the challenges represented by issues that barely could have been imagined or anticipated a generation ago.  This Court acknowledges the many expressions of concern arising from genuine love for our children and the fierce instinct to protect and raise our children safely in a society that is growing ever more complex.  There can be no doubt that all involved in this case have the best interests of the students at heart.”  However, this was no excuse for imposing a discriminatory and unconstitutional policy on Grimm.

“However well-intentioned some external challenges may have been,” Wright Allen continued, “and however sincere worries were about possible unknown consequences arising from a new school restroom protocol, the perpetuation of harm to a child stemming from unconstitutional conduct cannot be allowed to stand.  These acknowledgements are made in the hopes of making a positive difference to Mr. Grimm and to the everyday lives of our children who rely upon us to protect them compassionately and in ways that more perfectly respect the dignity of every person.”

Grimm had long since disclaimed any demand for financial compensation for the injuries he suffered in violation of his statutory and constitutional rights, so the court awarded only nominal (symbolic) damages of $1.00, but it directed that the School Board issue a new, corrected transcript in ten days, and the parties will now haggle about the size of the award of attorney’s fees and costs, which should be substantial.

Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen, nominated to the court by President Barack Obama, was the first female African-American judge to serve in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia after she was unanimously confirmed by the Senate (96-0) in May 2011.  She had previously been the top Federal Public Defender in the Eastern District of Virginia, and was a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and a military judge.  Prior to this ruling, her most noteworthy decision, issued in February 2014, declared Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

 

Supreme Court Orders “Further Consideration” by Washington State Courts in Wedding Flowers Case

Posted on: June 25th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

On June 25, the Supreme Court finally acted on a petition for certiorari filed last summer in Arlene’s Flowers, Inc. v. State of Washington, No. 17-108, in which Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sought review of the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling that unanimously affirmed the Benton County Superior Court’s decision that Arlene’s Flowers and its proprietor, Barronelle Stutzman, had violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination and its Consumer Protection Act by refusing to sell wedding flowers to a same-sex couple.  The Petition was docketed at the Supreme Court on July 14, 2017, after the Court had recently granted review in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. State of Colorado.  The Court did not place this Petition on the agenda for any of its certiorari conferences until after rendering its decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop on June 4, 2018.  Then on June 25, it granted the petition, vacated the lower court’s ruling, and sent the case back for “further consideration” in light of the Masterpiece ruling.

 

This case arose from an incident that occurred shortly after Washington began to issue same-sex marriage licenses as a result of the marriage equality litigation within the 9th Circuit.  Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, a same-sex couple planning their wedding, went to Arlene’s Flowers to order floral decorations for what they planned to be a big event.  Ingersoll had been a frequent customer of this business and had established a personal relationship with the proprietor, Barronelle Stutzman.  When he asked her to provide the flowers for his wedding, however, she told him that she could not design flowers for his wedding because of her relationship with Jesus Christ.  She gave him the names of three other florists, and claims he said he understood her decision and “they hugged before he left.”  Ingersoll and Freed decided to scale down their wedding plans as a result of this and evidently talked about their experience to others, generating news reports that spurred the state’s Attorney General to action.  Around the same time the state’s lawsuit was filed, Ingersoll and Freed, represented by the ACLU, filed their own suit, and the two cases were consolidated, resulting in State v. Arlene’s Flowers, 2015 WL 720213 (Wash. Super. Ct., Benton Co.), and State v. Arlene’s Flowers, 187 Wash. 2 804, 389 P.2d 543 (2017).  (Washington State allows direct action to enforce the statutes in question without requiring exhaustion of administrative remedies, and the Washington Supreme Court accepted Arlene’s Flowers’ petition for direct review, bypassing the state’s intermediate appellate court.) The state courts found that the defendant had violated the statutes, and that she was not entitled to any 1st Amendment defense.

Within days of the Masterpiece ruling, ADF had filed a supplementary brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of Arlene’s Flowers and Stutzman, urging the Court to grant certiorari, vacate the state court ruling, and remand for consideration in light of Masterpiece.  The Respondents (State of Washington and Ingersoll and Freed) quickly filed responding briefs, arguing that certiorari should be denied because there was nothing in the history of this case that suggested anything like the grounds on which Masterpiece had been decided.

In its supplementary brief, ADF mounted several arguments in support of its contention that Masterpiece could require a reversal in this case because of “hostility” to religion by the State of Washington.  First, ADF argued that the Attorney General’s action in filing suit against Barronelle Stutzman in both her professional and personal capacities, reacting to news reports and without the same-sex couple having filed their own discrimination claim, evinced hostility to religion.  Second, ADF argued that the trial court’s reliance on and quotation from a case cited by the Attorney General in which the court ruled against a retail store that refused on religious grounds to serve African-Americans was, in effect, comparing Barronelle to the “racist” owner of the store, further evincing “hostility” to her religion. Based on this, ADF argued, “the State, in short, has treated Barronelle with neither tolerance nor respect,” quoting Justice Kennedy’s phrase from Masterpiece.  ADF also pointed to the state’s failure to initiate litigation against a coffee-shop owner in Seattle who, according to a radio talk show, had “profanely berated and discriminated against Christian customers,” apparently seeking to draw an analogy to a situation described by Kennedy in Masterpiece, of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission dismissing charges against three bakers who had refused to bake anti-gay cakes in the wake of the Commission’s ruling against Masterpiece Cakeshop.

The State of Washington and the ACLU quickly filed responsive briefs, disputing the accuracy and relevance of ADF’s supplementary brief. For one thing, unlike Masterpiece Cakeshop, Arlene’s Flowers did not raise any issued in its original Petition about “hostility to religion” by the state and, Respondents argued, could not now introduce a new issue into the case.  For another, they pointed out, a party to litigation citing a case that supports its legal position cannot be considered “hostility to religion.”  After all, Justice Kennedy cited a similar federal case involving a restaurant that refused to serve African-Americans in his opinion in Masterpiece to support the point that it is well established that there is no general free exercise exemption from complying with public accommodations laws.  This doesn’t show hostility to religion by the court.  Furthermore, the A.G.’s filing of a discrimination complaint, in itself, is no evidence of animus or hostility, but merely doing his job, and the A.G. “played no adjudicatory role in the process of deciding this case.”  What Masterpiece required was that the forum not be hostile religion, and the forum is the court, not the parties to the case.

Furthermore, the A.G.’s brief pointed out, there was doubt about the accuracy of the talk radio report cited by ADF, but notwithstanding that, even though nobody filed a discrimination claim against the coffee shop owner, the chair of the Washington Human Rights Commission “publicly announced that she would send a letter to the business owner explaining Washington law,” and the owner subsequently announced, unlike Barronelle Stutzman, that “he will no longer refuse service to the customers he initially turned away.” Contrast this with the situation in Masterpiece, where Justice Kennedy counted as evidence of hostility that the Colorado Commission had rejected discrimination claims against three bakers who declined to make anti-gay cakes while ruling against Jack Phillips for refusing to make a same-sex wedding cake.  (As Justice Breyer explained in his concurring opinion joined by Justice Kagan, there was no inconsistency here as the two situations were clearly distinguishable.)

In any rate, a strong argument can be made that there is no basis for order “further consideration” of Arlene’s Flowers in light of Masterpiece.  In the days following a Supreme Court decision, the Court usually moves quickly to dispose of petitions in other cases that had been “on hold” pending its ruling.  It is not uncommon in such “mopping up” situations to send cases back to the lower courts for a determination whether the Supreme Court decision would require a different result.  But it is also common to merely deny the petition if the lower court ruling is clearly consistent with the new Supreme Court decision.  In this case, the Court’s action may be reacting to ADF’s assertion in its supplementary brief that there is evidence of hostility to religion in the proceedings in the Washington courts, and to a common practice by the Court of sending cases back for reconsideration if any member of the Court is troubled about possible inconsistency.  On the other hand, it may signal some ambiguity about exactly what the Court was holding in Masterpiece, and a desire by the Court, ultimately, to consider the underlying legal questions on the merits without any complications involving the nature of the lower court proceedings.

The Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling is certainly cause for concern, since that ruling is totally consistent with what Justice Kennedy said about the free exercise and free speech arguments that ADF advanced in Masterpiece, and a careful reading of Kennedy’s opinion shows that the Court did not back away, at least overtly, from its prior precedents holding that there is not a free exercise exemption from complying with laws banning discrimination in public accommodations.  Time will tell whether a firm majority of the Court is actually ready to reassert that position on the merits in an appropriate case.  Meanwhile, opponents of religious exemptions can take some comfort from the actions by the Arizona Court of Appeals and the Oregon Supreme Court (refusing to review a court of appeals ruling in another wedding cake case) in the weeks following the Masterpiece rule.

A Second US District Judge Blocks Trump’s Ban on Transgender Military Service

Posted on: November 21st, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

A second federal district judge has issued a preliminary injunction against implementation of President Donald Trump’s August 25 Memorandum implementing his July 26 tweet announcing a ban on all military service by transgender individuals. Stone v. Trump, Civil Action No. MJG-17-2459 (D. Md.). The November 21 action by District Judge Marvin J. Garbis of the District of Maryland came just three weeks after a federal district judge in the District of Columbia, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, had issued a preliminary injunction against two directives in Trump’s three-directive memo.  (See Doe v. Trump, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 178892, 2017 WL 4873042 (D.D.C. Oct. 30, 2017).  Judge Garbis took the next step, enjoining implementation of all three directives, finding that the plaintiff group represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in this case includes at least two individuals who had standing to challenge the directive against the military providing sex reassignment procedures for military personnel.

In his August 25 Memorandum, Trump directed that all transgender service members be discharged, beginning no later than March 23, 2018, and that the existing ban on accession of transgender members, scheduled to end on January 1, 2018, be extended indefinitely. His third directive provided that after March 23 the Defense Department cease providing sex reassignment surgery for transgender personnel, with a possible individual exception in cases where procedures were already under way and failure to complete them would endanger the health of the individual.  (Of course, those individuals, being identified as transgender, would be subject to discharge under the first directive in any event.)

On September 24, Secretary of Defense James Mattis issued a memorandum establishing an “interim policy,” announcing that he would meet the President’s deadline of submitting a “plan to implement the policy and directives in the Presidential Memorandum” by February 21, but until then, there would be no immediate effect on individual service members.

The ACLU filed this lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Maryland on August 8. Three other lawsuits challenging the transgender ban are pending.  One filed on August 9 in the District of Columbia District Court has already resulted in the preliminary injunction issued by Judge Kollar-Kotelly.  The others are pending in the District Courts in Seattle and Los Angeles, where the plaintiffs are also seeking preliminary injunctions.

Judge Garbis leaned heavily on Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s October 30 ruling for much of his analysis, agreeing with her that heightened scrutiny applies to the plaintiffs’ equal protection claim and that the usual judicial deference to military policy decisions by the Executive Branch was not appropriate in this case. The judge took particular note of an amicus brief filed by retired military officers and former national security officials, who had written that “this is not a case where deference is warranted, in light of the absence of any considered military policymaking process, and the sharp departure from decades of precedent on the approach of the U.S. military to major personnel policy changes.”

Continued Garbis, “President Trump’s tweets did not emerge from a policy review, nor did the Presidential Memorandum identify any policymaking process or evidence demonstrating that the revocation of transgender rights was necessary for any legitimate national interest. Based on the circumstances surrounding the President’s announcement and the departure from normal procedure, the Court agrees with the D.C. Court that there is sufficient support for Plaintiffs’ claims that ‘the decision to exclude transgender individuals was not driven by genuine concerns regarding military efficacy.’”

Indeed, Garbis concluded that heightened scrutiny was not even necessary to rule for the Plaintiffs on this motion. “The lack of any justification for the abrupt policy change, combined with the discriminatory impact to a group of our military service members who have served our country capably and honorably, cannot possibly constitute a legitimate governmental interest,” he wrote, so it would fail the minimally demanding rationality test applied to all government policies.

Garbis closely followed the D.C. Court’s analysis of the grounds for jurisdiction in this case, rejecting the government’s argument that nobody had been harmed yet so nobody had standing to bring the case, and that it was not yet ripe for judicial resolution when Mattis had not yet made his implementation recommendations to the President. The adoption of a policy that violates equal protection is deemed a harm even before it is implemented, and the stigmatic harm of the government officially deeming all transgender people as unfit to serve the country is immediate.  The court found that Trump’s directive that Mattis study how to implement the president’s orders was not, in effect, a mandate to recommend exceptions or abandonment of the ban, thus undercutting the government’s argument that it is merely hypothetical or speculative that the ban would go into effect unless enjoined by the courts.

Garbis went further than Kollar-Kotelly to enjoin the sex reassignment directive because the ACLU’s plaintiff group included at least two individuals whose transition procedures have already been disrupted and will be further disrupted if the ban goes into effect. The D.C. Court had accepted the government’s argument that appropriate adjustments had vitiated any negative effect on the plaintiffs in that case who were seeking transition procedures, but Garbis found that the timing of the transition procedures for the plaintiffs before him would be disrupted if the ban goes into effect, so the harm was not merely hypothetical.

The court based the preliminary injunction on its finding that plaintiffs were likely to prevail in their equal protection argument, and did not address the due process argument in that context. However, in rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the due process claim, Garbis accepted the plaintiffs’ argument that “it is egregiously offensive to actively encourage transgender service members to reveal their status and serve openly, only to use the revelation to destroy those service members’ careers.”

In perhaps the strongest statement in his opinion, Garbis wrote: “An unexpected announcement by the President and Commander in Chief of the United States via Twitter that ‘the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military’ can be considered shocking under the circumstances. According to news reports provided by Plaintiffs, the Secretary of Defense and other military officials were surprised by the announcement.  The announcement also drew swift criticism from retired generals and admirals, senators, and more than 100 Members of Congress.  A capricious, arbitrary, and unqualified tweet of new policy does not trump the methodical and systematic review by military stakeholders qualified to understand the ramifications of policy changes.”

The only setback suffered by the plaintiffs was dismissal, without prejudice, of their claim that the policy violates 10 U.S.C. sec. 1074(a)(1), a statute the entitles active duty and reserve military members to medical care in military treatment facilities. The plaintiffs claimed that the sex reassignment directive exceeded the President’s authority by attempting to override a statute by “denying necessary medical care to a group of service member he happens to disfavor,” and that doing so through a unilateral White House memorandum rather than a regulation adopted pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act was unlawful.  Garbis characterized the plaintiffs’ factual allegations in support of this claim as “conclusory” and thus not sufficient to meet the civil pleading requirement.  However, he wrote, “Perhaps Plaintiffs could assert an adequate and plausible statutory claim,” so he dismissed without prejudice, allowing the plaintiffs to seek permission to file an amendment that “adequately asserts such a claim if they can do so.”  This dismissal does not really affect the substance of the relief granted by the preliminary injunction or sought in the ongoing case, because Judge Garbis granted the preliminary injunction on constitutional grounds against implementation of Trump’s sex reassignment surgery, exactly the part of the Trump memorandum targeted by the statutory claim.

The Justice Department will likely seek to appeal this ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, just as it had announced that it would appeal Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.  By the time an appeal is considered, however, it is likely that preliminary injunctions will also have been issued by the district courts in Seattle and Los Angeles.  Maybe a united front of judicial rejections of the transgender ban will convince Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose department is defending the ban, that it is time to withdraw the August 25 Memorandum and disavow the July 26 tweet.

Since the Administration takes the position that Presidential tweets are official policy statements of the President, a disavowal of the tweets would be necessary to render the policy fully withdrawn, one presumes, although this is unexplored territory. Interestingly, Judge Garbis followed Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s example by including a cut and paste version of the Trump tweet sequence in the background section of his opinion, and specifically identified policy announcement by tweet as a departure from normal procedure that contributes to the constitutional analysis.

Judge Garbis, a Senior U.S. District Judge, was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

Trump Changes Policy on Military Service by Transgender Individuals

Posted on: August 27th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

On July 26, to the surprise of Defense Department officials and members of the White House staff, Donald Trump transmitted a series of three tweets beginning at 8:55 a.m. announcing a new policy concerning military service by transgender individuals. “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow……  ….Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.  Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming….. ….victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”  This appeared to be a complete reversal of a policy decision made a year earlier by the Defense Department, which after a period of prolonged study that included a report commissioned from the RAND Corporation (a “think-tank” that specializes in producing studies on defense-related issues by contract with the DoD) and widespread consultations within the military and with military allies that allow transgender individuals to serve had concluded to rescind an existing regulation that established a ban on service by transgendered individuals on purported medical grounds.  As a result of the policy newly announced during June 2016, hundreds of transgender service members “came out” to their superior officers, and some service members who had been concealing their gender identity for years began the process of transition with the assurance that the costs would be covered under military health policies.  Estimates of the number of transgender service members ranged from a few thousand as high as 15,000, most of whom have not yet made their presence known to their commanding officers.  This unknown group likely includes many officers as well as enlisted personnel.

Attempts to discern details of the new policy were at first unsuccessful because neither the usual sources in the White House nor the Pentagon had received any advance notice or details. Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, Commandant of the Coast Guard, immediately announced that the Coast Guard would not “abandon” its several openly-transgender members, and that he and his staff had reached out to reassure them.  The other military service heads and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff quickly announced that there would be no change of policy until some formal directive came from the Office of the President.  A spontaneous presidential tweet was not deemed by the Pentagon to be an order to abandon an existing published policy.  The White House finally issued a document titled “Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security” on August 25, signed by President Trump, directing a series of steps that appeared to fall far short of the draconian July 26 tweets.

After a paragraph summarizing what had been done the previous summer and noting that the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security had extended a July 1, 2017, date for allowing transgender people to join the military to January 1, 2018, the President stated his reasoning: “In my judgment, the previous Administration failed to identify a sufficient basis to conclude that terminating the Departments’ longstanding policy and practice would not hinder military effectiveness and lethality, disrupting unit cohesion, or tax military resources, and there remain meaningful concerns that further study is needed to ensure that continued implementation of last year’s policy change would not have those negative effects.”  This was stated in blithe disregard of the fact that over the past year transgender military service members, in reliance on the announced policy change, had come out to their commanders by the hundreds and that there was no evidence during that time of any adverse effect on military operations or unit cohesion, or of significant strain on the military’s budget attributable to this policy change.  There has been no reporting that military commanders had asked to abandon the policy allowing transgender individuals to serve, and there has been no reporting that either Trump or members of his staff have actually reviewed the voluminous materials generated by the review process undertaken by the DoD prior to announcing its change of policy in June 2016, or were reacting to actual data indicating problems over the past year (since there have not been reports of any such problems).

After invoking the president’s powers as Commander in Chief, the Memorandum continues, “I am directing the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the U.S. Coast Guard, to return to the longstanding policy and practice on military service by transgender individuals that was in place prior to June 2016 until such time as a sufficient basis exists upon which to conclude that terminating that policy and practice would not have the negative effects discussed above. The Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Secretary of Homeland Security, may advise me at any time, in writing, that a change to this policy is warranted.”

The Memorandum then sets out specific “directives,” apparently intended to be the operative provisions of the Memorandum. First is to “maintain the currently effective policy regarding accession of transgender individuals into military service beyond January 1, 2018, until such time as the Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Secretary of Homeland Security, provides a recommendation to the contrary that I find convincing.”  In other words, the existing ban on enlisting transgender individuals will continue indefinitely, but can be ended when the Secretary of Defense convinces the president to end it.  Second is to “halt all use of DoD or DHS resources to fund sex reassignment surgical procedures for military personnel, except to the extent necessary to protect the health of an individual who has already begun a course of treatment to reassign his or her sex.” Interestingly, this directive mentions only “sex reassignment surgical procedures” but not any of the other costs associated with gender transition, including hormone treatment, which may reflect either ignorance by the White House staffers who drafted the Memorandum or a deliberate intention to make the exclusion as narrow as possible, focusing only on the political “flashpoint” of surgery. The Memorandum states that this second directive about surgical expenses will take effect on March 23, 2018.  In other words, transgender individuals currently serving will continue to be covered for sex reassignment surgical procedures at least until March 23, 2018, and continuing beyond then if cutting off coverage on that date interferes with completing surgical procedures already under way.  Or at least, that’s what it appears to say.

Third, in the section titled “effective dates and implementation,” the Memorandum gives the Secretary of Defense until February 21, 2018, to submit to the president a “plan for implementing both the general policy set forth in section 1(b) of this memorandum and the specific directives set forth in section 2 of this memorandum. The implementation plan shall adhere to the determinations of the Secretary of Defense, made in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, as to what steps are appropriate and consistent with military effectiveness and lethality, budgetary constraints, and applicable law.  As part of the implementation plan, the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall determine how to address transgender individuals currently serving in the United States military.  Until the Secretary has made that determination, no action may be taken against such individuals under the policy set forth in section 1(b) of this memorandum.”  The Memorandum also has a severability provision, the usual disclaimers accompanying presidential directives about not creating new rights or changing the authority of any government departments or agencies, and permission to the Secretary to publish the Memorandum in the Federal Register.  (It was made immediately available on the White House website.)

On a plain reading, the “effective dates and implementation” section appears to mark a substantial retreat from the absolutist tone of the July 26 tweets. In trying to construe the tweets, there had been speculation that transgender service members would be immediately discharged or pressured to resign in order to avoid discharge.  Leaks from the White House while staff members were working on a written guidance for the president to sign led to reports that transgender enlisted personnel would be allowed to serve out their enlistments but then be denied reenlistment while being encouraged to resign earlier, and that transgender officers could continue to serve their commissions but would be required to resign if being considered for promotions.

Based on the leaks, GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), the Boston-based New England public interest law firm, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), based in San Francisco, with cooperating attorneys from Foley Hoag LLP and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, filed a lawsuit on August 9 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, representing five “Jane Doe” plaintiffs, all presently serving transgender individuals, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. Doe v. Trump, Case 1:17-cv-01597.  The plaintiffs, with varying lengths of service, present compelling stories about the harms the proposed policy would have on them, based, of course, on what was known when the complaint was filed.  Among them, of course, were interference with ongoing transitions, interference with attaining military pensions (which some were close to vesting), and loss of career and benefits, affecting not only the plaintiffs but their family members as well.  There was also the emotional stress generated by uncertainty about their future employment and welfare.

The three-count complaint asserts violations of equal protection and due process (Fifth Amendment) and invokes the doctrine of estoppel to prevent adverse moves against the plaintiffs and those similarly situated as presently serving transgender members of the military who had been encouraged to “come out” as transgender under the earlier policy. The named defendants, in addition to the president, are Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., the Departments of the Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard, Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy, Air Force Secretary Heather A. Wilson, Homeland Security Secretary Elaine C. Duke, and, for good measure, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  There was some speculation and criticism that filing the lawsuit before a formal policy was announced or implemented was premature and might result in a dismissal on grounds of standing or ripeness, but the release of the formal guidance just a few weeks after the suit was filed will undoubtedly lead to the filing of an amended complaint focusing more specifically at the changes announced in the Memorandum.  The lengthy delay specified by the Memorandum for implementing changes may be invoked by the Justice Department in seeking to get this case dismissed.  Perhaps the Memorandum was drafted with this strategic use in mind.

Press coverage of the July 26 tweets showed overwhelming opposition and criticism from media, many government officials, and members of both parties in Congress. Those who voiced support of the president’s announcement came from the House Republicans who had waged a losing battle to amend a pending Defense budget measure to ban use of any appropriations to pay for sex reassignment surgery for military members, and there were soon press reports that supporters of that amendment had specifically asked the president to take steps to prevent spending federal funds for this purpose.  Furthermore, it was reported that threats had been made to block passage of the Defense measure – which was intended to provide some funding for the president’s project to “build the wall” along the U.S. border with Mexico (reflecting his ignorance of world history, and most specifically of the spectacular failure of the vaunted “Maginot Line” constructed after World War I to protect France from any future invasion by German military forces) – unless the president prevented military expenditures on sex reassignment procedures.  To the simple-minded president, the solution was obvious.  Reviving a ban on all military service by transgender individuals meant that there would be no openly transgender individuals in the military seeking to have such procedures performed and, since reversing Obama Administration policies regardless of their merits seems to be the main goal of many of Trump’s actions, simply overturning the Obama Administration policy became his simplistic solution to his political problem.  There was no indication that Trump made this decision after consulting “my Generals” or military experts – at least, the White House never revealed the names of any such individuals who were consulted, and it appeared that Secretary Mattis had merely been informed of the president’s intentions the night before the tweets.  One suspects that Trump’s “expert” was likely Steve Bannon, a former Marine.

The August 25 Memorandum did not require the immediate, or even eventual, discharge of anybody, and appeared to give Secretary Mattis wide discretion to come up with an implementing plan and at least six months to do it, while barring any action against transgender service members during the intervening time. Furthermore, in typical “kick the can down the road” Trump style (which is, admittedly, a typical style of U.S. politicians generally, only more pronounced in this president), it leaves open the possibility that the Obama Administration policies will be left in place, provided Mattis asks for this in writing summoning persuasive evidence that nothing is gained and much is lost by preventing transgender individuals from enlisting or being commissioned out of the service academies or by blocking transgender service members (including commissioned officers) from continuing their service.  Press accounts noted that the anticipated expense of covering sex reassignment surgery was dwarfed by the annual military expenditure on Viagra and similar drugs  (Who knew, as Trump might ask, that the Defense Department, the government’s most “macho” agency, was spending so much money to stiffen the limp genitals of male members?), and that the replacement costs for several thousand fully-trained and productive military members would far outweigh the costs of down-time for the relatively small number of individuals at any given time who might be unavailable for assignment while recovering from sex reassignment surgery.  (There is no indication that the other steps in gender transition, including hormone therapy, are disabling in a way that would interfere with military service.)

As worded, the Memorandum leant itself to the interpretation that with the passage of time, as the immediate political problem that “inspired” Trump to emit his tweets had been surmounted, sober heads could prevail, Mattis could reassure the transgender troops that nothing was happening right away, and eventually the president would accept Mattis’s written recommendation to allow transgender individuals to serve after all. (This interpretation depends on Mattis having the fortitude and political courage to tell the president, as he had done during the transition after the election on the subject of torture as an interrogation device, that Trump’s announced position did not make sense as a matter of military policy.)  Of course, the Memorandum directive means continuing discrimination against transgender individuals who seek to enlist, raising serious constitutional issues in light of the increasing recognition by federal courts that gender identity discrimination is a form of sex discrimination in equal protection doctrine, but the Memorandum, as it plays out, could avoid the loss of employment for transgender individuals now serving, although it would pose continuing emotional stress stemming from the uncertainty of future developments until Mattis convinces the president to countermand his new “policy.”

When the GLAD/NCLR suit was filed, other organizations, including Lambda Legal and ACLU, announced that they would be preparing lawsuits as well, and the release of the Memorandum on August 25 led to immediate announcements that more lawsuits will be filed. “See you in court,” wrote ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero to the organization’s supporters.  As with other “bold” executive actions by Trump, this anti-transgender initiative may be stopped in its tracks by preliminary injunctions, although the Memorandum was evidently drafted to try to minimize that likelihood by suggesting that nothing much is going to happen right away other than the continuing ban on enlistment.  As to the enlistment ban, it is questionable that the original GLAD/NCLR plaintiffs, all currently serving members, have standing to challenge it, but one expects that an amended complaint would add as plaintiffs some transgender individuals who hope to enlist.

A Flood of New Litigation on LGBT Rights

Posted on: May 10th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

May has brought a flood of litigation over LGBT rights in the federal courts. During the first few days of the month, half a dozen federal lawsuits were filed addressing either the transgender bathroom issue or continuing state-level resistance to marriage equality.

First out of the box was a lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago on May 4 by two right-wing litigation groups – The Thomas More Society and the Alliance Defending Freedom – challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s agreement with Township School District 211 that settled a lawsuit about transgender restroom access.   Under the settlement agreement the school district will allow transgender students to use restrooms and other facilities consistent with their gender identity.  The case stirred considerable local controversy, and the litigation groups were able to recruit five students and their parents, banding together as “Students and Parents for Privacy,” to challenge the settlement.  They argue that the students have a fundamental constitutional right of “bodily privacy” that is violated when transgender students show up in the restroom, that the settlement violates the parents’ fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children by exposing the children to such shocking things, and, perhaps most importantly, that the Education Department’s position that gender identity discrimination violates Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, a federal law that bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money, is a misinterpretation of that statute and was not validly adopted.

This last argument rests on a plausible reading of the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal statute that specifies procedures that federal agencies must follow when they adopt new regulations. While the Education Department has not adopted a regulation on the subject, the plaintiffs make a strong argument that its enforcement of its interpretation is tantamount to a regulation.  The plaintiffs argue that the Department is not free to take such a position without going through the formalities of the Administrative Procedure Act, because the Department is enforcing its view as if it was a regulation and because the position it is taking was consistently rejected for the first several decades of Title IX’s existence.  (The statute dates from the early 1970s.)  If the courts agree, the Department would have to go through a time-consuming process that could stretch out over many months in order to adopt a valid regulation, and then the regulation would be subject to challenge in the federal appeals courts, which could tie it up in litigation for years.

On the other hand, many of the plaintiffs’ arguments have already been rejected by the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, when it ruled on April 19 that a federal court in Virginia should have deferred to the Education Department’s interpretation of Title IX in a case brought by a transgender boy seeking appropriate restroom access in his Virginia high school.  That ruling turned on the court’s agreement with the Education Department that existing statutory provisions and regulations (which allow schools to maintain separate restrooms for males and females) were ambiguous as to how to treat transgender people, justifying the Department in adopting a position consistent with its view of the purpose of the law to provide equal educational opportunity.  The 4th Circuit held that the district court should defer to the Department’s judgment, since it was not a clearly erroneous interpretation of the statute and the existing regulations.  In the Chicago lawsuit, the plaintiffs argue that the statute and regulations are not ambiguous, but this rests on their assertion that the Congress that passed Title IX so long ago could not have intended any meaning for the term “sex” other than “biological sex” as determined at birth.  The 4th Circuit, by contrast, found that the term “sex” without any explanatory statutory definition could have a variety of meanings depend upon the context in which it was used, and is thus inherently ambiguous.

Chicago is in the 7th Circuit, so the 4th Circuit’s ruling is not binding on the lawsuit filed there.  More than thirty years ago, the 7th Circuit ruled in a case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that discrimination because of gender identity did not violate the sex discrimination provision and the federal court in Chicago may find itself constrained, if not directly bound, by that precedent under a different but parallel statute, although thirty years of developments in the courts have arguably rendered it obsolete.  Federal courts have generally held that the term “sex” in Title VII and Title IX should be given the same meaning, and that cases construing one of those statutes can be consulted when construing the other.

Just five days later, on May 9, there was a flurry of new litigation in the U.S. District Courts of North Carolina, focused on the bathroom provisions of H.B. 2. H.B. 2 was introduced in the state legislature, approved by both houses and signed by Governor Pat McCrory in one day, March 23.  It wiped out local government bans on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, quashed the right of North Carolinians to sue for any kind of discrimination in state courts, and prohibited localities from adopting their own rules on government contracting and minimum wages.  Most controversially, however, it provided that in all public facilities with restrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms and the like, multi-occupancy facilities must be segregated by biological sex, defined as the sex recorded on a person’s birth certificate.  The state’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, denounced the measure as discriminatory and said his office would not defend it.

Lambda Legal and the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit in the Middle District of North Carolina on March 28, challenging portions of H.B. 2 under the 14th Amendment and Title IX, and subsequently one of the transgender plaintiffs in the case also filed charges of discrimination under Title VII with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (which had ruled last year that Title VII requires employers to allow transgender employees to use restrooms consistent with their gender identity).  Within a few weeks, the 4th Circuit’s April 19 ruling in the Virginia Title IX case placed the legality of the bathroom provisions in doubt.  The controversy surrounding H.B. 2, especially the bathroom provision and the preemption of local anti-discrimination ordinances, caused adverse reactions that echoed throughout the country as governors and mayors prohibited official travel to North Carolina, some major employers announced reconsideration of plans to locate facilities there, and conventions and major musical performers cancelled activities in the state.  But Governor McCrory and the Republican state legislative leaders rejected calls to rescind the statute.

The Justice Department weighed in early in May, when the Civil Rights Division sent a letter to Governor McCrory, who had been vigorously defending the law in national media, informing him that the Justice Department considered the bathroom provision to violate federal sex discrimination laws and demanding a response by May 9. Governor McCrory’s response was to file a lawsuit on May 9, seeking a declaration from the federal district court in the Eastern District of North Carolina that the bathroom provisions did not violate federal civil rights laws.  U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch then held a press conference at which she unveiled a new lawsuit by the federal government against North Carolina, filed in the Middle District of North Carolina, seeking a declaration that the bathroom provision violates federal law.  Lynch’s statement, which quickly went viral on the internet, promised transgender people that the federal government recognized them and was standing behind them, thus putting the full weight of the Justice Department on the line backing the Education Department and the EEOC in their interpretations of “sex discrimination” under their respective statutes.

Since North Carolina Attorney General Cooper was refusing to defend H.B. 2, Governor McCrory retained a private lawyer, Karl S. Bowers, Jr., of Columbia, South Carolina, who filed the complaint co-signed by the governor’s General Counsel, Robert C. Stephens, and local North Carolina attorneys from the Raleigh firm of Millberg Gordon Stewart PLLC.  Presumably they will also be conducting the defense in the Justice Department’s case.  Their argument, consistent with McCrory’s public statements, was that the state was not discriminating against transgender people, merely requiring them to use alternative facilities in order to protect the privacy rights of others.  The complaint echoed the governor’s “common sense privacy policy” argument, and insisted that federal courts have “consistently” found that Title VII “does not protect transgender or transsexuality per se.”  While the complaint lists half a dozen federal court rulings supporting that position, it conveniently fails to note numerous court decisions holding to the contrary, including decisions by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati, and district courts in many different states.

The Justice Department will probably move to transfer McCrory’s case to the Middle District of North Carolina, where it can be consolidated with the Justice Department’s lawsuit and perhaps the pending Lambda/ACLU lawsuit. There was another lawsuit defending H.B. 2 filed on May 9 in the Eastern District court by North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland), but it is hard to conceive how they could have standing to bring a federal lawsuit on their own, so it is likely to be dismissed if the government makes a motion to that effect.

Meanwhile, there were also new litigation developments in Mississippi, challenging House Bill 1523, the so-called “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.” HB 1523 was passed in response to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell marriage equality decision of last June 26.  Subsequent to Obergefell, the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal district court injunction against the state of Mississippi’s enforcement of its anti-gay marriage ban, and marriage equality came to the state.  State legislators quickly went to work undermining this by devising H.B. 1523, which essentially gives government officials, businesses, and religious believers permission to discriminate against same-sex couples, provided that the discriminators have a sincere religious belief that marriage should only involve one man and one woman.  The measure is scheduled to go into effect on July 1.

The ACLU lawsuit filed on May 9 in the federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, charges that H.B. 1523 violates the 14th Amendment “by subjecting the lawful marriages of same-sex couples to different terms and conditions than those accorded to different-sex couples.”  In effect, Mississippi has set up a “separate but equal” framework, which “imposes a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all married same-sex couples in Mississippi.”  The lawsuit names as defendant the Mississippi State Registrar of Vital Records, Judy Moulder.

Among its many discriminatory provisions, H.B. 1523 provides that government employees “who wish to recuse themselves from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples” will be required to Moulder, and she will be required to maintain a list of officials who have recused themselves from providing same-sex couples with the services that are routinely provided to different-sex couples, and they will be excused from providing these services to same-sex couples. These recusant officials are also charged by the statute with a requirement to make arrangements to insure that same-sex couples do receive the services to which they are entitled, but the statute does not establish any mechanism to ensure compliance with this provision.

The ACLU lawsuit seeks a declaration from the court that H.B. 1523 is unconstitutional “on its face” and an injunction against it going into effect.   It was immediately followed by more court action, as New York attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represents the plaintiffs in the Mississippi marriage equality case, filed a motion in federal district court on May 10, asking Judge Carlton Reeves to reopen the case so they can name Judy Moulder as an additional defendant and modify his injunction to require the state to come up with the necessary procedures to ensure that same-sex couples who seek to marry will not encounter any delays due to recusals on religious grounds by state officials.  Indeed, she argues, anyone recusing themselves from serving same-sex couples should be disqualified from serving different-sex couples as well, as failure to do so would violate the obligations of all state officials to provide non-discriminatory service. The motion also asks that the list of recusant officials be posted on the website of the Registrar of Vital Records so that couples won’t have to subject themselves to the indignity of being turned away when they seek marriage licenses.