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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 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 to Decide Whether Discrimination Because of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity Violates Title VII’s Ban on Discrimination Because of Sex

Posted on: April 22nd, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on April 22 that it will consider appeals next term in three cases presenting the question whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination because of an individual’s sex, covers claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity. Because federal courts tend to follow Title VII precedents when interpreting other federal sex discrimination statutes, such as the Fair Housing Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a ruling in these cases could have wider significance than just employment discrimination claims.

The first Petition for certiorari was filed on behalf of Gerald Lynn Bostock, a gay man who claimed he was fired by the Clayton County, Georgia, Juvenile Court System, for which he worked as Child Welfare Services Coordinator, because of his sexual orientation.  Bostock v. Clayton County Board of Commissioners, No. 17-1618 (filed May 25, 2018).  The trial court dismissed his claim, and the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal, 723 Fed. Appx. 964 (11th Cir., May 10, 2018), petition for en banc review denied, 894 F.3d 1335 (11th Cir., July 18, 2018), reiterating an old circuit precedent from 1979 that Title VII does not forbid discrimination against homosexuals.

The second Petition was filed by Altitude Express, a now-defunct sky-diving company that discharged Donald Zarda, a gay man, who claimed the discharge was at least in part due to his sexual orientation.  Altitude Express v. Zarda, No. 17-1623 (filed May 29, 2018).  The trial court, applying 2nd Circuit precedents, rejected his Title VII claim, and a jury ruled against him on his New York State Human Rights Law claim.  He appealed to the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which ultimately ruled en banc that the trial judge should not have dismissed the Title VII claim, because that law applies to sexual orientation discrimination.  Zarda v. Altitude Express, 883 F.3d 100 (2nd Cir., Feb. 26, 2018). This overruled numerous earlier 2nd Circuit decisions.

The third petition was filed by R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, three establishments located in Detroit and its suburbs, which discharged a funeral director, William Anthony Beasley Stephens, when Stephens informed the proprietor, Thomas Rost, about her planned transition.   R.G. & G.R. Funeral Homes v EEOC, No. 18-107 (filed July 20, 2018).  Rost stated religious objections to gender transition, claiming protection from liability under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the funeral home under Title VII.  Stephens, who changed her name to Aimee as part of her transition, intervened as a co-plaintiff in the case.  The trial judge found that Title VII had been violated, but that RFRA protected Harris Funeral Homes from liability.  The Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s holding that the funeral home violated Title VII, but reversed the RFRA ruling, finding that complying with Title VII would not substantially burden the funeral home’s free exercise of religion.  EEOC v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, 884 F.3d 560 (6th Cir., March 7, 2018).  The 6th Circuit’s ruling reaffirmed its 2004 precedent in Smith v. City of Salem, 378 F.3d 566, using a gender stereotyping theory, but also pushed forward to hold directly that gender identity discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII.

In all three cases, the Court has agreed to consider whether Title VII’s ban on discrimination “because of sex” is limited to discrimination against a person because the person is a man or a woman, or whether, as the EEOC has ruled in several federal employment disputes, it extends to sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination claims.

The question whether the Court would consider these cases has been lingering on its docket almost a year, as the petitions in the Bostock and Zarda cases were filed within days of each other last May, and the funeral home’s petition was filed in July.  The Court originally listed the Bostock and Zarda petitions for consideration during its pre-Term “long conference” at the end of September, but then took them off the conference list at the urging of Alliance Defending Freedom, representing the funeral home, which suggested that the Court should wait until briefing on the funeral home was completed and then take up all three cases together.

The Court returned the petitions to its conference list in December, and the cases were listed continuously since the beginning of this year, sparking speculation about why the Court was delaying, including the possibility that it wanted to put off consideration of this package of controversial cases until its next term, beginning in October 2019.  That makes it likely that the cases will not be argued until next winter, with decisions emerging during the heat of the presidential election campaign next spring, as late as the end of June.

Title VII was adopted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and went into effect in July 1965.  “Sex” was added as a forbidden ground of discrimination in employment in a floor amendment shortly before House passage of the bill.  The EEOC, originally charged with receiving and investigating employment discrimination charges and attempting to conciliate between the parties, quickly determined that it had no jurisdiction over complaints charging sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, and federal courts uniformly agreed with the EEOC.

The courts’ attitude began to change after the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that evidence of sex stereotyping by employers could support a sex discrimination charge under Title VII in the case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (plurality opinion by Justice William J. Brennan), and in 1998 in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, 523 U.S. 75 (opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia), the Court suggested that Title VII could apply to a “same-sex harassment” case.   Justice Scalia stated that Title VII’s application was not limited to the concerns of the legislators who voted for it, but would extend to “comparable evils.”

These two rulings were part of a series of cases in which the Supreme Court took an increasingly flexible approach to interpreting discrimination “because of sex,” which in turn led lower federal courts earlier in this century to reconsider their earlier rulings in LGBT discrimination cases.  Federal appeals court rulings finding protection for transgender plaintiffs relied on Price Waterhouse’s sex stereotyping analysis, eventually leading the EEOC to rule in 2012 that a transgender applicant for a federal job, Mia Macy, could bring a Title VII claim against the federal employer.  Macy v. Holder, 2012 WL 1435995. In 2015, the EEOC extended that analysis to a claim brought by a gay air traffic controller, David Baldwin, against the U.S. Transportation Department, Baldwin v. Foxx, 2015 WL 4397641, and the EEOC has followed up these rulings by filing discrimination claims in federal court on behalf of LGBT plaintiffs and appearing as amicus curiae in such cases as Zarda v. Altitude Express.

In the Harris Funeral Homes case, the 6th Circuit became the first federal appeals court to go beyond the sex stereotype theory for gender identity discrimination claims, agreeing with the EEOC that discrimination because of gender identity is always discrimination because of sex, as it involves the employer taking account of the sex of the individual in making a personnel decision.  The EEOC’s argument along the same lines for sexual orientation discrimination was adopted by the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 853 F.3d 339 (7th Cir. en banc), a case that the losing employer did not appeal to the Supreme Court.  In 2018, the 2nd Circuit endorsed the EEOC’s view in the Zarda case.

During the oral argument of Zarda in the 2nd Circuit, the judges expressed some amusement and confusion when an attorney for the EEOC argued in support of Zarda’s claim, and an attorney for the Justice Department argued in opposition.  When the case was argued in September 2017, the EEOC still had a majority of commissioners appointed by President Obama who continued to support the Baldwin decision, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions took the position on behalf of the Justice Department that federal sex discrimination laws do not apply to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination claims.

Due to the Trump Administration’s failure to fill vacancies on the EEOC, the Commission currently lacks a quorum and cannot decide new cases.  Thus, the Solicitor General’s response for the government to Harris Funeral Home’s petition for review did not really present the position of the Commission, although the Solicitor General urged the Court to take up the sexual orientation cases and defer deciding the gender identity case.  Perhaps this was a strategic recognition that unless the Court was going to back away from or narrow the Price Waterhouse ruling on sex stereotyping, it was more likely to uphold the 6th Circuit’s gender identity ruling than the 2nd Circuit’s sexual orientation ruling in Zarda, since the role of sex stereotyping in a gender identity case seems more intuitively obvious to federal judges, at least as reflected in many district and appeals court decisions in recent years.

The Court sometimes tips its hand a bit when granting certiorari by reframing the questions posed by the Petitioner.  It did not do this regarding sexual orientation, merely stating that it would consolidate the two cases and allot one hour for oral argument.  Further instructions will undoubtedly come from the Court about how many attorneys will be allotted argument time, and whether the Solicitor General or the EEOC will argue on the sexual orientation issue as amicus curiae.

The Court was more informative as to Harris Funeral Homes, slightly rephrasing the question presented in the Petition.  The Court said that the Petition “is granted limited to the following question: Whether Title VII prohibits discrimination against transgender people based on (1) their status as transgender or (2) sex stereotyping under Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins.”  One wonders why the Supreme Court used the phrase “status as transgender” rather than “gender identity” in describing the first part of the question, since “gender identity” fits more neatly into the terminology of Title VII than a reference to “status.”

None of the members of the Court have addressed the questions presented in these three cases during their judicial careers up to this point, so venturing predictions about how these cases will be decided is difficult lacking pertinent information.  The four most recent appointees to the Court with substantial federal judicial careers prior to their Supreme Court appointment – Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh – have never written a published opinion on sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, and neither did Chief Justice John Roberts during his brief service on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.  However, it seems predictable that the justices most committed to construing civil rights laws narrowly in the context of the time when they were adopted will be skeptical about the argument that the 1964 statute can be interpreted to extend to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

The counsel of record for Bostock is Brian J. Sutherland of Buckley Beal LLP, Atlanta.  Clayton County, Georgia, retained Jack R. Hancock of Freeman Mathis & Gary LLP, of Forest Park, Georgia, to submit its response to the Bostock Petition.  Counsel of record for Altitude Express is Saul D. Zabell of Bohemia, New York.  The brief in opposition was filed on behalf of the Zarda Estate by Gregory Antollino of New York City.  Zabell and Antollino were both trial counsel in the case and have pursued it through the appellate process.  Several attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom, the Scottsdale, Arizona, based conservative religious liberty litigation group, represent Harris Funeral Home, and Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco’s office represents the EEOC.   John A. Knight of the ACLU Foundation, Chicago, is counsel of record for Aimee Stephens.  It is not unusual when the Supreme Court grants review for private parties to seek out experienced Supreme Court advocates to present their arguments to the Court, so some of these attorneys listed on the Petitions and other Briefs will likely not be appearing before the Court when the cases are argued next winter.

 

 

 

 

Justice Department’s New Request to Implement Transgender Policy Denied by Seattle District Court

Posted on: June 19th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

U.S. Senior District Judge Marsha J. Pechman issued an opinion on June 15, rejecting another attempt by the Trump Administration to get her to lift her preliminary injunction in Karnoski v. Trump and allow the latest version of President Trump’s ban on military service by transgender individuals to go into effect while they appeal her earlier rulings to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.  Hope springs eternal at the Justice Department, as their new motion does not really make any arguments that Judge Pechman did not reject in her earlier opinions.  The new opinion in Karnoski v. Trump, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 100789 (W.D. Wash.), rejects the same arguments emphatically.

Last July, the President tweeted his declaration that transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the U.S. military in any capacity, purporting to reverse a policy on transgender service adopted by the Obama Administration and in effect since July 1, 2016. A month later the White House issued a memorandum setting out the President’s new policy in greater detail, including an implementation date in March 2018 and a permanent postponement of the January 1, 2018, date that had been set by Defense Secretary James Mattis last June for allowing transgender individuals to apply to join the service.  Four lawsuits were filed by different groups of plaintiffs in District Courts in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Seattle, and Riverside (California), challenging the constitutionality of the policy.  All four federal district judges found that the plaintiffs were likely to win on the merits and issued preliminary injunctions intended to have national effect, forbidding implementation of the policy while the litigation proceeded.  None of the district judges were willing to stay their injunctions pending appeal, and the D.C. and 4th Circuit Courts of Appeals also rejected motions to stay, at which point the Justice Department temporarily desisted from further appeals.

Meantime, Trump had ordered Mattis to come up with a written plan for implementation of the August Memorandum, to be submitted to the White House in February. After Mattis submitted his proposal, which departed in some particulars from the August Trump Memorandum, Trump “withdrew” his Memorandum and tweets and authorized Mattis to adopt his plan.  The Justice Department then argued to Judge Pechman that her preliminary injunction should be lifted, because the policy at which it was directed was no longer on the table.

The judge concluded, however, in line with the plaintiff’s arguments, that the new policy was just a slightly modified version of the earlier policy, presenting the same constitutional flaws, so she refused to vacate her injunction. Instead, responding to motions for summary judgment, she ruled that the case should proceed to discovery and a potential hearing on contested fact issues.  The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal to the 9th Circuit on April 30, and filed a motion with Judge Pechman seeking an expedited ruling on the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment so that it could be appealed.  However, the judge declined to issue an expedited ruling, as discovery was supposed to take place and disputed facts might require a hearing to resolve.  Discovery has been delayed by the Justice Department’s insistence that much of the information the plaintiffs seek is covered by Executive Privilege, a dubious claim at best. The Justice Department has filed a motion with the 9th Circuit asking it to stay the preliminary injunction pending appeal, but as of June 15 the 9th Circuit had not responded to the motion.

Judge Pechman’s June 15 opinion said that “each of the arguments raised by Defendants already has been considered and rejected by the Court, and Defendants have done nothing to remedy the constitutional violations that supported entry of a preliminary injunction in the first instance.” She pointed out that she was no more persuaded now than she had been previously by the argument that Mattis’s Implementation Plan was a “new and different” policy.

The Justice Department also argued that “the Ninth Circuit and/or this Court ultimately are highly likely to conclude that significant deference is appropriate,” but Judge Pechman responded, “whether any deference is due remains unresolved.  Defendants bear the burden of providing a ‘genuine’ justification for the Ban.  To withstand judicial scrutiny, that justification must ‘describe actual state purposes, not rationalizations’ and must not be ‘hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation.’”  To date,” she observed, “Defendants have steadfastly refused to put before the Court evidence of any justification that predates this litigation.”

She also pointed out that there are four nationwide preliminary injunctions in effect, not just hers. “As a practical matter,” she wrote, “Defendants face the challenge of convincing each of these courts to lift their injunctions before they may implement the Ban.”

The Justice Department also argued that failure to let the government implement the ban “will irreparably harm the government (and the public) by compelling the military to adhere to a policy it has concluded poses substantial risks.” But, Judge Pechman pointed out, at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Armed Services held after her injunction went into effect, both the Army Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, had testified that there were no problems with transgender people serving, as thousands are now doing.  Milley testified that he “monitors very closely” the situation and had received “precisely zer”’ reports of problems related to unit cohesion, discipline and morale.  Similarly, Admiral Richardson testified that he had received no negative reports, and that, in his experience, “it’s steady as she goes.”

The judge had already found that staying her injunction would likely cause irreparable injury to the plaintiffs, and that, in fact, “maintaining the injunction pending appeal advances the public’s interest in a strong national defense, as it allows skilled and qualified service members to continue to serve their country.”  She also rejected the Justice Department’s argument that her injunction should just apply to the nine individual transgender plaintiffs in the case, stating, “The Ban, like the Constitution, would apply nationwide.  Accordingly, a nationwide injunction is appropriate.”  And, she wrote, “The status quo shall remain ‘steady as she goes,’ and the preliminary injunction shall remain in full force and effect nationwide.”

The plaintiffs in the Karnoski case are represented by a small army of lawyers affiliated with Lambda Legal, Kirkland & Ellis (Chicago), Outserve-SLDN, and Seattle local counsel Newman & Du Wors LLP. The state of Washington, co-plaintiff in the case, is represented by attorneys from Kirkland & Ellis and the Washington Attorney General’s Office.  Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, the Constitutional Accountability Center, and Legal Voice (formerly known as the Northwest Women’s Law Center) are also participating in this case as amicus on behalf of the plaintiffs.

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.

Supreme Court May Consider Whether Federal Law Already Outlaws Sexual Orientation Discrimination

Posted on: July 12th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Lambda Legal has announced that it will petition the Supreme Court to decide whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employment discrimination because of sex, also bans discrimination because of sexual orientation. Lambda made the announcement on July 6, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, announced that the full circuit court would not reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel that had ruled on March 10 against such a claim in a lawsuit by Jameka K. Evans, a lesbian security guard who was suing Georgia Regional Hospital for sexual orientation discrimination.

The question whether Title VII can be interpreted to cover sexual orientation claims got a big boost several months ago when the full Chicago-based 7th Circuit ruled that a lesbian academic, Kimberly Hively, could sue an Indiana community college for sexual orientation discrimination under the federal sex discrimination law, overruling prior panel decisions from that circuit.  The 7th Circuit was the first federal appeals court to rule in favor of such coverage.  Lambda Legal represented Hively in her appeal to the 7th Circuit.

Title VII, adopted in 1964 as part of the federal Civil Rights Act, did not even include sex as a prohibited ground of discrimination in the bill that came to the floor of the House of Representatives for debate. The primary focus of the debate was race discrimination. But a Virginia representative, Howard Smith, an opponent of the bill, introduced a floor amendment to add sex.  The amendment was approved by an odd coalition of liberals and conservatives, the former out of a desire to advance employment rights for women, many of the later hoping that adding sex to the bill would make it too controversial to pass. However, the amended bill was passed by the House and sent to the Senate, where a lengthy filibuster delayed a floor vote for months before it passed without much discussion about the meaning of the inclusion of sex as a prohibited ground for employment discrimination.  (The sex amendment did not apply to other parts of the bill, and the employment discrimination title is the only part of the 1964 Act that outlaws sex discrimination.)

Within a few years both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and federal courts had issued decisions rejecting discrimination claims from LGBT plaintiffs, holding that Congress did not intend to address homosexuality or transsexualism (as it was then called) in this law. The judicial consensus against coverage did not start to break down until after the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision on Ann Hopkin’s sex discrimination lawsuit against Price Waterhouse.  The accounting firm had denied her partnership application.  The Court accepted her argument that sex stereotyping had infected the process, based on sexist comments by partners of the firm concerning her failure to conform to their image of a proper “lady partner.”

Within a few years, litigators began to persuade federal judges that discrimination claims by transgender plaintiffs also involved sex stereotyping. By definition a transgender person does not conform to stereotypes about their sex as identified at birth, and by now a near consensus has emerged among the federal courts of appeals that discrimination because of gender identity or expression is a form of sex discrimination under the stereotype theory.  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission changed its position as well, following the lead of some of the court decisions, in 2012.

Advocates for gay plaintiffs also raised the stereotype theory, but with mixed success. Most federal circuit courts were unwilling to accept it unless the plaintiff could show that he or she was gender-nonconforming in some obvious way, such as effeminacy in men or masculinity (akin to the drill sergeant demeanor of Ann Hopkins) in women.  The courts generally rejected the argument that to have a homosexual or bisexual orientation was itself a violation of employer’s stereotypes about how men and women were supposed to act, and some circuit courts, including the New York-based 2nd Circuit, had ruled that if sexual orientation was the “real reason” for discrimination, a Title VII claim must fail, even if the plaintiff was gender nonconforming.  Within the past few years, however, several district court and the EEOC have accepted the stereotype argument and other arguments insisting that discrimination because of sexual orientation is always, as a practical matter, about the sex of the plaintiff.  This year, for the first time, a federal appeals court, the Chicago-based 7th Circuit, did so in the Hively case.  A split among the circuits about the interpretation of a federal statute is listed by the Supreme Court in its practice rules as the kind of case it is likely to accept for review.

The Supreme Court has been asked in the past to consider whether Title VII could be interpreted to cover sexual orientation and gender identity claims, but it has always rejected the invitation, leaving in place the lower court rulings.

However, last year the Court signaled its interest in the question whether sex discrimination, as such, includes gender identity discrimination, when it agreed to review a ruling by the Richmond-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the district court should not have dismissed a sex-discrimination claim by Gavin Grimm, a transgender high school student, under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans sex discrimination by schools that get federal money.  The 4th Circuit held in Grimm’s case that the district court should have deferred to an interpretation of the Title IX regulations by the Obama Administration’s Department of Education, which had decided to follow the lead of the EEOC and federal courts in Title VII cases and accept the sex stereotyping theory for gender identity discrimination claims. Shortly before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear arguments in this case, however, the Trump Administration “withdrew” the Obama Administration interpretation, pulling the rug out from under the 4th Circuit’s decision.  The Supreme Court then canceled the argument and sent the case back to the 4th Circuit, where an argument has been scheduled for this fall on the question whether Title IX applies in the absence of such an executive branch interpretation.

Meanwhile, the Title VII issue has been percolating in many courts around the country. Here in New York, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has had several recent panel decisions in which the judges have refused to allow sexual orientation discrimination claims because they are bound by earlier decisions of the court to reject them, although in some cases they have said that the gay plaintiff could maintain their Title VII case if they could show gender nonconforming behavior sufficient to evoke the stereotype theory. In one of these cases, the chief judge of the circuit wrote a concurring opinion, suggesting that it was time for the Circuit to reconsider the issue by the full court.  In another of these cases, Zarda v. Altitude Express, the court recently granted a petition for reconsideration by the full bench, appellants’ briefs and amicus briefs were filed late in June, and oral argument has been scheduled for September 26.  The EEOC as well as many LGBT rights and civil liberties organizations and the attorneys general of the three states in the circuit have filed amicus briefs, calling on the 2nd Circuit to follow the 7th Circuit’s lead on this issue.

This sets up an interesting dynamic between the 11th Circuit case, Evans, and the 2nd Circuit case, Zarda.  Lambda’s petition for certiorari (the technical term for seeking Supreme Court review) is due to be filed by 90 days after the denial of its rehearing petition by the 11th Circuit, which would put it early in October, shortly after the 2nd Circuit’s scheduled argument in Zarda.  After Lambda files its petition, the Respondent, Georgia Regional Hospital (perhaps, as a public hospital, represented by the state attorney general’s office), will have up to 30 days to file a response, but this is uncertain, since the hospital failed to send an attorney to argue against Evans’ appeal before the 11th Circuit panel.  Other interested parties who want the Supreme Court to take or reject this case may filed amicus briefs as well.  If Lambda uses all or virtually all of its 90 days to prepare and file its petition, the Supreme Court would most likely not announce whether it will take the case until late October or November.  If it takes the case, oral argument would most likely be held early in 2018, with an opinion expected by the end of the Court’s term in June.

That leaves the question whether the 2nd Circuit will move expeditiously to decide the Zarda case?  Legal observers generally believe that the 2nd Circuit is poised to change its position and follow the 7th Circuit in holding that sexual orientation claims can be litigated under Title VII, but the circuit judges might deem it prudent to hold up until the Supreme Court rules on the Evans petition and, if that petition is granted, the 2nd Circuit might decide to put off a ruling until after the Supreme Court rules.  In that case, there will be no change in the 2nd Circuit’s position until sometime in the spring of 2018, which would be bad news for litigants in the 2nd Circuit.  Indeed, some district judges in the Circuit are clearly champing at the bit to be able to decide sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII, and two veteran judges have bucked the circuit precedent recently, refusing to dismiss sexual orientation cases, arguing that the 2nd Circuit’s precedents are outmoded.  A few years ago the 2nd Circuit accepted the argument in a race discrimination case that an employer violated Title VII by discriminating against a person for engaging in a mixed-race relationship, and some judges see this as supporting the analogous argument that discriminating against somebody because they are attracted to a person of the same-sex is sex discrimination.

The 2nd Circuit has in the past moved to rule quickly on an LGBT issue in a somewhat similar situation.  In 2012, cases were moving up through the federal courts challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which had been held unconstitutional by several district courts.  A race to the Supreme Court was emerging between cases from Boston (1st Circuit), New York (2nd Circuit), and San Francisco (9th Circuit).  The Supreme Court received a petition to review the 1st Circuit case, where GLAD represented the plaintiffs.  The ACLU, whose case on behalf of Edith Windsor was pending before the 2nd Circuit, filed a petition with the Supreme Court seeking to leapfrog the district court and bring the issue directly up to the highest court.  After the ACLU filed its petition, the 2nd Circuit moved quickly to issue a decision, and the Supreme Court granted the petition.  Meanwhile, Lambda Legal, representing the plaintiff whose case was pending in the 9th Circuit, had filed its own petition asking the Supreme Court to grant review before the 9th Circuit decided that appeal.  It was all a bit messy, but ultimately the Court granted the ACLU’s petition and held the other petitions pending its ultimate decision, announced on June 26, 2013, declaring DOMA unconstitutional.  If the 2nd Circuit moves quickly, it might be able to turn out an opinion before the Supreme Court has announced whether it will review the Evans case, as it did in 2012 in the DOMA case (although that was just a panel decision, not a ruling by the full circuit bench.)  The timing might be just right for that.

Another concern, of course, is the composition of the Supreme Court bench when this issue is to be decided. At present, the five justices who made up the majority in the DOMA and marriage equality cases are still on the Court, but three of them, Justices Anthony Kennedy (who wrote those opinions), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, are the three oldest justices, and there have been rumors about Kennedy considering retirement.  Donald Trump’s first appointee to the Court, Neil Gorsuch, filling the seat previously occupied by arch-homophobe Antonin Scalia, immediately showed his own anti-LGBT colors with a disingenuous dissenting opinion issued on June 26 in a case from Arkansas involving birth certificates for the children of lesbian couples, and it seems likely that when or if Trump gets another appointment, he will appoint a person of similar views.  Kennedy, who turns 81 this month, has not made a retirement announcement and has hired a full roster of court clerks for the October 2017 Term, so it seems likely he intends to serve at least one more year.  There is no indication that Ginsburg, 84, or Breyer, 79 in August, plan to retire, but given the ages of all three justices, nothing is certain.

5th Circuit Tosses Challenge to Mississippi HB 1523 on Standing Grounds

Posted on: June 24th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

A three-judge panel of the Houston-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit dissolved a preliminary injunction and dismissed two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of H.B. 1523, a Mississippi law enacted last year intended to assure that people who hold anti-gay or anti-transgender views cannot be subject to any adverse action from their state or local governments.  Barber v. Bryant, 2017 Westlaw 2702075, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 11116 (June 22, 2017).

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, finding that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that the law violated their equal protection rights as well as the constitutional prohibition on establishment of religion, issued a preliminary injunction last June 30, so the law, which was to become effective last July 1, has not gone into effect. Ruling on June 22, the panel found that none of the plaintiffs had standing to bring this challenge to the law because, in the court’s opinion, none had suffered an individualized injury that would give them the right to challenge the law.

The court was careful to state that because it did not have jurisdiction over the case, it was not expressing an opinion about whether the law was constitutional.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys from the two cases announced that they would seek “en banc” review by the full 5th Circuit bench and, failing that, would petition the Supreme Court.  The 5th Circuit is a notably conservative bench, however, with only four of the fourteen active judges having been appointed by Democratic presidents.  The three-judge panel that issued this decision consisted entirely of Republican appointees.

Section 2 of the law identifies three “religious beliefs or moral convictions” and states that people who act in accord with those beliefs or convictions are protected from “discriminatory” action by the state, such as adverse tax rulings, benefit eligibility, employment decisions, imposition of fines or denial of occupational licenses.  The “religious beliefs or moral convictions” are as follows:  “(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman; (b) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and (c) male (man) or female (woman) refers to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.”

The statute provides further that people who claim to have suffered some adverse action because they act on these beliefs have a right to sue state officials, and to use this law as a defense if they are sued by individuals.

Making its effect more concrete, the statute specifically protects religious organizations that want to discriminate against LGBTQ people in employment, housing, child placement, and marriages, and protects parents who decide to “raise their foster or adoptive children in accordance” with one of the three listed beliefs. Businesses that provide wedding services are protected against liability for denying such services to LGBTQ people, as are medical and mental health care providers, except for emergency medical situations.  For example, a health care provider cannot interfere with visitation with a patient by their designated representative (who may be a same-sex partner or spouse).  State agencies that license professionals may not refuse to license somebody because they hold or articulate one of the listed beliefs.

The statute also specifically protects “any entity that establishes sex-specific standards for facilities such as locker rooms or restrooms,” and protects state employees who want to voice their beliefs as listed in the statute.  It also specifically allows county clerks and judges to refuse to deal with same-sex couples seeking to marry, so long as arrangements are made to allow such marriages to take place without delay.

To sum up, the statute clearly sought to exempt religious organizations and individuals from having to treat LGBTQ people as equal with everybody else, providing “special rights” to discriminate against LGBTQ people and same-sex couples.  Ironically, because Mississippi law does nothing to protect the civil rights of LGBTQ people, many of the applications of this statute are more symbolic than real, at least as far as state law goes.  A Mississippi landlord incurs no state law penalty for refusing to rent a dwelling place to a same-sex couple, for example, and businesses in Mississippi are free to deny goods or services to people who are gay or transgender without incurring any state law penalty.  Few local governments in Mississippi have adopted laws that would be affected, although some educational institutions would clearly be affected, especially by the facilities access provision.

The problem for the plaintiffs, in the eyes of the court of appeals, was that the judges could not see that any of the plaintiffs have the kind of particularized injury to give them standing to sue the state in federal court when this law had not even begun to operate.  The plaintiffs had relied heavily on the argument that the law imposed a stigma, signaling second-class citizenship, and sought to enshrine by statute particular religious views, but the court rejected these arguments as insufficient.

The plaintiffs pointed to cases in which courts had ruled that plaintiffs offended by government-sponsored religious displays had been allowed to challenge them under the 1st Amendment in federal court, but Judge Jerry E. Smith, writing for the panel, rejected this analogy.  The court also rejected taxpayer standing, finding that H.B. 1523 did not authorize expenditures in support of religion.  The court found that by protecting both “religious beliefs and moral convictions,” the legislature had avoided privileging religion, since persons whose anti-gay beliefs were not religiously motivated would be protected from adverse government treatment under this act.  An atheist who believes same-sex marriage is wrong or that sex is immutable would be protected, even if these beliefs had no religious basis.

One plaintiff who based his standing on his intention to marry in the future was rejected by the court, which pointed out that he did not specify when or where he intended to marry.  “He does not allege that he was seeking wedding-related services from a business that would deny him or that he was seeking a marriage license or solemnization from a clerk or judge who would refuse to be involved in such a ceremony, or even that he intended to get married in Mississippi,” wrote Judge Smith.

The court made clear that if anybody actually suffers a concrete injury after the law goes into effect, they could file a new lawsuit and raise their challenge.

 

4th Circuit Judges Hail Gavin Grimm as a Civil Rights Leader

Posted on: April 10th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

A pair of federal appeals court judges have saluted Gavin Grimm, a transgender high school senior, as a civil rights leader in the struggle to establish equal rights for transgender people under the law.

On April 7, the Richmond-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a motion by the Gloucester County (Virginia) School District to vacate a preliminary injunction issued last summer by the U.S. District Court, which had ordered the school district to allow Grimm, a transgender boy, to use the boys’ restrooms at the high school during his senior year.  G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, 2017 WL 1291219.

That Order was quickly stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which then agreed to hear the school board’s appeal of the Order last fall. However, after the Trump Administration withdrew the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, to which the 4th Circuit had deferred in ordering the district court to issue the Order, the Supreme Court cancelled the scheduled oral argument and returned the case to the 4th Circuit.  Although the Order is now vacated, presumably the 4th Circuit still retains jurisdiction to decide whether the district court was correct in its decision to dismiss Gavin Grimm’s sex discrimination claim under Title IX in the absence of an administrative interpretation to which to defer, since it was Grimm’s appeal of the dismissal that brought the case to the 4th Circuit in the first place.

Although the court granted the school district’s unopposed motion to vacate the Order, a member of the panel, Senior Circuit Judge Andre M. Davis, was moved to write a short opinion reflecting on the case. Circuit Judge Henry M. Floyd directed that Davis’s opinion be published together with the 4th Circuit’s order, and Judge Paul V. Niemeyer, who had dissented from the 4th Circuit’s decision, agreed to the publication.

Davis’s eloquent brief opinion deserves to be read in full. Throughout the opinion, Grimm is referred to by his initials, as the case was filed on his behalf by his mother and stalwart champion in his struggle for equal rights, Deirdre Grimm.

DAVIS, Senior Circuit Judge, concurring:

G.G., then a fifteen-year-old transgender boy, addressed the Gloucester County School Board on November 11, 2014, to explain why he was not a danger to other students. He explained that he had used the boys’ bathroom in public places throughout Gloucester County and had never had a confrontation. He explained that he is a person worthy of dignity and privacy. He explained why it is humiliating to be segregated from the general population. He knew, intuitively, what the law has in recent decades acknowledged: the perpetuation of stereotypes is one of many forms of invidious discrimination. And so he hoped that his heartfelt explanation would help the powerful adults in his community come to understand what his adolescent peers already did. G.G. clearly and eloquently attested that he was not a predator, but a boy, despite the fact that he did not conform to some people’s idea about who is a boy.

Regrettably, a majority of the School Board was unpersuaded. And so we come to this moment. High school graduation looms and, by this court’s order vacating the preliminary injunction, G.G.’s banishment from the boys’ restroom becomes an enduring feature of his high school experience. Would that courtesies extended to others had been extended to G.G.

Our country has a long and ignominious history of discriminating against our most vulnerable and powerless. We have an equally long history, however, of brave individuals—Dred Scott, Fred Korematsu, Linda Brown, Mildred and Richard Loving, Edie Windsor, and Jim Obergefell, to name just a few—who refused to accept quietly the injustices that were perpetuated against them. It is unsurprising, of course, that the burden of confronting and remedying injustice falls on the shoulders of the oppressed. These individuals looked to the federal courts to vindicate their claims to human dignity, but as the names listed above make clear, the judiciary’s response has been decidedly mixed. Today, G.G. adds his name to the list of plaintiffs whose struggle for justice has been delayed and rebuffed; as Dr. King reminded us, however, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” G.G.’s journey is delayed but not finished.

G.G.’s case is about much more than bathrooms. It’s about a boy asking his school to treat him just like any other boy. It’s about protecting the rights of transgender people in public spaces and not forcing them to exist on the margins. It’s about governmental validation of the existence and experiences of transgender people, as well as the simple recognition of their humanity. His case is part of a larger movement that is redefining and broadening the scope of civil and human rights so that they extend to a vulnerable group that has traditionally been unrecognized, unrepresented, and unprotected.

G.G.’s plight has shown us the inequities that arise when the government organizes society by outdated constructs like biological sex and gender. Fortunately, the law eventually catches up to the lived facts of people; indeed, the record shows that the Commonwealth of Virginia has now recorded a birth certificate for G.G. that designates his sex as male.

G.G.’s lawsuit also has demonstrated that some entities will not protect the rights of others unless compelled to do so. Today, hatred, intolerance, and discrimination persist — and are sometimes even promoted — but by challenging unjust policies rooted in invidious discrimination, G.G. takes his place among other modern-day human rights leaders who strive to ensure that, one day, equality will prevail, and that the core dignity of every one of our brothers and sisters is respected by lawmakers and others who wield power over their lives.

G.G. is and will be famous, and justifiably so. But he is not “famous” in the hollowed-out Hollywood sense of the term. He is famous for the reasons celebrated by the renowned Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, in her extraordinary poem, Famous. Despite his youth and the formidable power of those arrayed against him at every stage of these proceedings, “[he] never forgot what [he] could do.”

Judge Floyd has authorized me to state that he joins in the views expressed herein.

S. Nye, “Famous”:

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

Federal Court Awards Preliminary Restroom Access Relief to Transgender Students on Their Constitutional Claim

Posted on: February 28th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Switching the focus from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Equal Protection Clause of the federal Constitution, U.S. District Judge Mark R. Hornak of the Western District of Pennsylvania awarded a preliminary injunction on February 27 to three transgender high school students represented by Lambda Legal who are challenging a school board resolution that bars them from using sex-segregated restrooms that are consistent with their gender identities. Evancho v. Pine-Richland School District, Civil No. 2:16-01537.

Acknowledging the Trump Administration’s February 22 action withdrawing two letters sent by the U.S. Education Department during the Obama Administration on the subject of transgender restroom access under Title IX as well as the pending U.S. Supreme Court consideration of Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. (certiorari granted October 28, 2016), a Title IX claim by Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy from Virginia, against his school district, in which that Court granted the school district’s request to stay a preliminary injunction issued by the district court (see 136 S. Ct. 2442 (Aug. 3, 2016)), Judge Hornak wrote that he “cannot conclude that the path to relief sought by the Plaintiffs under Title IX is at the moment sufficiently clear that they have a reasonable likelihood of success on that claim.”  A “reasonable likelihood” finding is a prerequisite to issuing preliminary relief.

On the other hand, Hornak concluded that the plaintiffs did have such a path under the Equal Protection Clause and decided to blaze a new trail on this issue, in which prior courts have focused their attention almost exclusively on Title IX in line with the general preference of federal courts to rule based on statutes rather than resorting to constitutional rulings.

Hornak prefaced his constitutional analysis with a detailed set of factual findings and a sharp focus on the particular facts of this case, including that the three transgender students involved all began their transitions a few years ago and had been using restrooms consistent with their gender identities without any opposition from school administrators or any disturbance as early as the 2013-14 school year. In each case, they and their parents had met with school administrators, who had agreed to recognize and honor their gender identities in all respects.  Each of them has been living consistent with their gender identity for several years, although because of their ages only one of them has obtained a new birth certificate.  Administrators, teachers and fellow students have consistently used their preferred names and pronouns and treated them accordingly.  It wasn’t until a student mention the restroom use to her parents, who then contacted the school board together with other parents and turned it into an “issue,” that administrators even became aware that the transgender students were using the restrooms, since nobody had complained about it or made it an issue before then.  Ultimately the school board responded to noisy parental opposition at a series of public meetings, first rejecting a resolution allowing the transgender students to use the restrooms consistent with their gender identity by a tie vote, then adopting a contrary resolution by a slim margin.

The judge also pointed out that the boys’ and girls’ restrooms at the Pine-Richland high school were designed with individual privacy in mind, with dividers between the urinals in the boys’ rooms and privacy-protecting stalls with internal locks for the toilets in both rooms. Locker room access is not an issue at this point in the case, since all three plaintiffs have completed their physical education requirements and are not using the locker rooms.  The school also has established numerous single-user restrooms that are accessible to students.  The judge easily concluded, based on uncontested evidence that the restrictive Resolution was not necessary to protecting anybody’s privacy, thus rejecting one of the main justifications advanced by the school board.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over federal trial courts in Pennsylvania, has ruled on what standard of judicial review applies to government policies that discriminate because of gender identity. The school board argued that this means the court should use the least demanding standard, rationality review, to evaluate its policy.  Judge Hornak rejected that argument, saying, “First, that means that applying an Equal Protection standard other than rational basis in such a setting is not contrary to settled law, and second, when an issue is fairly and squarely presented to a District Court, that Court must address it. Dodging the question is not an option.”  He also observed that an earlier decision by another trial judge in his district involving a transgender student, Johnston v. University of Pittsburgh, 97 F. Supp. 3d 557 (W.D. Pa. 2015), was not binding on him, and he found that case distinguishable on the facts and the law, not least because of the extended period in this case during which the plaintiffs used restrooms without incident and had full recognition of their gender identity by the school administration and staff.

Reviewing the various criteria that the Supreme Court has discussed in cases about the appropriate level of equal protection review, Hornak concluded that the “intermediate standard” used in sex discrimination cases should apply in this case. “The record before the Court reflects that transgender people as a class have historically been subject to discrimination or differentiation; that they have a defining characteristic that frequently bears no relation to an ability to perform or contribute to society; that as a class they exhibit immutable or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group; and that as a class, they are a minority with relatively little political power.”  Focusing on this particular case, he wrote, “As to these Plaintiffs, their transgender characteristics are inherent in who they are as people, which is not factually contested by the District.  As to these Plaintiffs, and more generally as to transgender individuals as a class, that characteristic bears no relationship to their ability to contribute to our society.  More precisely, the record reveals that the Plaintiffs are in all respects productive, engaged, contributing members of the student body at the High School.  Thus, all of the indicia for the application of the heightened intermediate scrutiny standard are present there.”

That means that the defendants have the burden to justify their discriminatory policy, and the judge concluded they were likely to fall short in that. “Specifically, what is missing from the record here are facts that demonstrate the ‘exceedingly persuasive justification” for the enforcement of Resolution 2 as to restroom use by these Plaintiffs that is substantially related to an important governmental interest,” wrote Hornak.  The Resolution was not shown to be “necessary to quell any actual or incipient threat, disturbance or other disruption of school activity by the Plaintiffs,” he found, and there was no evidence that it was necessary to “address any such threat or disturbance by anyone else in the High School restrooms.” Furthermore, it did not address any privacy concern “that is not already well addressed by the physical layout of the bathrooms,” he found, continuing, “it would appear to the Court that anyone using the toilets or  urinals at the High School is afforded actual physical privacy from others viewing their external sex organs and excretory functions.  Conversely, others in the restrooms are shielded from such views.”  And the school’s existing code of conduct as well as state laws already exist to deal with any “unlawful malicious ‘peeping Tom’ activity by anyone pretending to be transgender,” he wrote, dismissing a concern raised by the defendants as a hypothetical justification for the policy.

The school board argued that some parents had threatened to withdraw their students from school if the Board did not keep transgender students out of the restrooms, but the court was not willing to countenance this as a justification for the policy. “If adopting and implementing a school policy or practice based on those individual determinations or preferences of parents – no matter how sincerely held – runs counter to the legal obligations of the District,” he wrote, “then the District’s and the Board’s legal obligations must prevail. Those obligations to the law take precedence over responding to constituent desires,” because the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause “is neither applied nor construed by popular vote.”

Furthermore, rejecting the Board’s argument that enjoining the Resolution while the case proceeds was an improper change of the “status quo,” the court found that for several years the plaintiffs freely using the restrooms consistent with their gender identity was the “status quo,” even if school officials claimed they were unaware of it. This was a “persistently-applied custom or practice” which had the same weight as a written policy and, of course, until the Resolution was adopted, the District had no written policy on this issue.  The court rejected the defendants’ argument that the availability of single-user restrooms “sprinkled around the High School” provided a sufficient “safety valve” for the plaintiffs, making an injunction unnecessary.  “Given that settled precedent provides that impermissible distinctions by official edict cause tangible Constitutional harm,” he wrote, “the law does not impose on the Plaintiffs the obligation to use single-user facilities in order to ‘solve the problem.’” He found that this was “no answer under the Equal Protection Clause that those impermissibly singled out for different treatment can, and therefore must, themselves ‘solve the problem’ by further separating themselves from their peers.”

He easily concluded that the differential treatment inflicted irreparable harm on the plaintiffs, and that ordering the District to allow them to use gender-appropriate restrooms would “cause relatively little ‘harm’ in the preliminary injunction sense – if any harm at all – to the District and the High School community.” It was crucial to this conclusion, of course, that the plaintiffs had been using the restrooms without incident for years until some parents made an issue out of it.  He also found that issuing the injunction would serve the public interest by vindicating the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs.

In case a second-guessing court of appeals should disagree with his determination that heightened scrutiny applied to this case, Judge Hornak also stated that the Resolution probably would not even survive rationality review, since he found that it was not necessary to achieve any of the goals suggested by the defendants.

Judge Hornak’s decision not to grant the injunction based on Title IX seems prudent in light of the unsettled situation he describes. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in the Gavin Grimm case depended on deference to the Obama Administration’s interpretation of the Education Department’s bathroom regulation.  With that interpretation being “withdrawn” by the Trump Administration in a letter that did not substitute any new interpretation in its place, there is nothing to defer to and the construction of the statute and regulation is now pending before the Supreme Court, which voted 5-3 last summer to stay the district court’s preliminary injunction in the Grimm case.  Hornak noted that the criteria for the Supreme Court issuing a stay in a case like that include the Court’s judgment that the case presents a serious possibility of being reversed by the Court on the merits.  What he omits to mention is that the stay was issued only because Justice Stephen Breyer, who would in other circumstances have likely voted against granting the stay, released an explanation that he was voting for the stay as a “courtesy” to the four more conservative justices, undoubtedly because they had the four votes to grant a petition to review the 4th Circuit’s ruling.  Under the Supreme Court’s procedures, five votes are needed to take an action, such as issuing a stay or reversing a lower court ruling, but only four votes are needed to grant a petition to review a lower court decision.  It was clear in that case that the Gloucester County School Board would be filing a petition for review and that there were four justices ready to grant it.  Judge Hornak interpreted that, as Justice Breyer clearly did, as a signal that the interpretation of Title IX in this context is up for grabs.  If Neil Gorsuch is confirmed by the Senate in time to participate in deciding that case, the outcome will probably turn on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted for the stay.  (Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan announced that they would have denied the stay.)

Judge Hornak’s ruling confirms that for the overwhelming majority of educational institutions subject to Title IX because they receive federal funds, it does not really matter whether Title IX requires them to afford gender-consistent restroom access to transgender students (or staff, for that matter), because as government-operated institutions they are bound to respect the Equal Protection rights of their students and employees. However, for non-governmental educational institutions that receive federal funds, either through work-study programs, loan assistance, or research grants in the case of the major private universities, their federal obligations towards transgender students depend on Title IX and whatever state or local laws might apply to them as places of public accommodation, which vary from state to state, only a minority of states and localities protecting transgender people from discrimination.

In light of the lack of 3rd Circuit appellate precedent on the constitutional issue, it would not be surprising if the defendants seek a stay of this injunction from the court of appeals, and there is no predicting how that court would rule, although the likelihood that the Supreme Court will issue a ruling of some sort in the Grimm case by the end of June might lead them to err on the side of caution to give the school district temporary relief.

Lambda Legal’s attorneys representing the plaintiffs are Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Christopher Clark and Kara Ingelhart, who are joined by local counsel in Pennsylvania, Tracie Palmer and David C. Williams of Kline & Specter, P.C..

Supreme Court Will Hear Title IX Transgender Discrimination Case and Case Challenging Social Media Restrictions on Sex Offenders

Posted on: October 30th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

Supreme Court Will Hear Title IX Transgender Discrimination Case and Case Challenging Social Media Restrictions on Sex Offenders

The Supreme Court substantially enlivened its docket for the October 2016 Term on October 28 when it granted petitions for certiorari in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., No. 16-273, and Packingham v. North Carolina, No. 15-1194.  In Gloucester, a school district in Virginia, obligated not to discriminate because of sex under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, seeks review of the 4th Circuit’s decision, 822 F.3d 709 (2016), holding that the district court should defer to the U.S. Department of Education’s interpretation of a regulation on restrooms in educational facilities, 34 C.F.R. Sec. 106.33, that would require the school to let a transgender boy use the boys’ restroom facilities at his high school.  In Packingham, the petitioner seeks to overturn the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision, 368 N.C. 380, 777 S.E.2d 738 (2015), upholding his conviction for violating North Carolina’s rules governing registered sex offenders by posting a message on Facebook.com celebrating the dismissal of a traffic ticket.  Lester Packingham claims that the broad prohibition of his use of social media violates his 1st Amendment rights.

The Gloucester Case

The Gloucester case was closely watched by LGBT lawyers and legal commentators for presenting the Court with a vehicle to respond to the broader question of whether federal laws prohibiting discrimination “because of sex,” mostly passed many decades ago, can now be construed to forbid gender identity discrimination (and maybe, also, sexual orientation discrimination), despite the obvious lack of intent by the enacting legislators in the 1960s and 1970s to reach such discrimination.  That is, to recur to a question repeatedly raised by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, are we governed by the intentions of our legislators or by reasonable interpretations of the actual texts they adopted in their statutes, or that administrative agencies subsequently adopted in regulations intended to aid in the enforcement of the statutes?  Scalia, who was an ardent foe of using “legislative history” as a method of statutory interpretation, decisively argued that courts should focus on the language of the statute, not viewed in isolation of course but rather in the context of the overall statute (including any declaration of congressional purpose contained in it), and he won unanimous concurrence by his colleagues in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998), holding that a man employed in an all-male workplace could maintain an action for hostile environment sexual harassment under Title VII, even though it was unlikely that the enacting Congress in 1964 was thinking about same-sex harassment when it amended Title VII to add “sex” to the list of forbidden grounds for workplace discrimination.  Scalia wrote for the Court that we are governed by the statutory text, and thus Mr. Oncale could maintain his Title VII suit subject to his burden to prove that he was harassed “because of sex” as specified by the statute.  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has prominently cited and quoted from Justice Scalia’s Oncale opinion in its federal employment rulings of recent years (Macy, Lusardi, Baldwin) holding that discrimination because of gender identity or sexual orientation is “necessarily” discrimination “because of sex,” even though the 1964 Congress would not necessarily have thought so.  Although Gloucester does not directly involve Title VII, federal courts have generally followed Title VII precedents when they interpret the sex discrimination ban in Title IX, as the 4th Circuit explained in this case.

The controversy arose when fellow students and their parents objected to Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy, using the boys’ restrooms during fall term of his sophomore year, in 2014. The principal of the high school had given Grimm permission to use the boys’ restrooms, after being presented with the facts about Grimm’s transition and his discomfort with continuing to use the girls’ restrooms, since he was dressing, grooming, and – most significantly – strongly identifying as male.  Responding to the complaints, the Gloucester County School Board voted to establish a policy under which students were required to use the restroom consistent with their “biological sex” – the sex identified on their birth certificate – or to use a gender-neutral restroom, of which there were a few in the high school.  Grimm was dissatisfied with this turn of events and enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Virginia to sue the school board in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Newport News.  The case was assigned to Senior U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar, who was appointed to the district court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.  The plaintiff was identified in the original complaint as “G.G., by his next friend and mother, Deirdre Grimm,” but Gavin Grimm decided early on to be open about his role as plaintiff and has spoken publicly about the case.  The complaint relied on Title IX as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Ruling on a motion for a preliminary injunction by the plaintiff and a motion to dismiss by the defendants on September 17, 2015, 132 F. Supp. 3d 736, Judge Doumar found that Grimm could not win a ruling on the merits of his Title IX claim because, in the judge’s view, Title IX regulations expressly allowed schools to maintain separate restroom facilities for boys and girls based on “sex,” and so it was not unlawful for them to require Grimm to use restrooms consistent with his “sex” which, in the school district’s view, was female. He rejected the ACLU’s claim that he should defer to the U.S. Department of Education’s interpretation of the “bathroom regulation,” which was articulated in a letter that the Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) sent in January 2015 as a “party in interest” in response to Grimm’s request for the Department’s assistance in his case.  OCR took the position, consistent with recent developments in sex discrimination law, that Grimm should be treated as a boy under the circumstances because it was undisputed that this was his gender identity, and thus under the regulation he was entitled to use the boy’s restroom, although he could also request as an accommodation to have access to gender-neutral facilities.   To Judge Doumar, the text of the regulation was clear and unambiguous, so the OCR’s attempt to ‘interpret’ the regulation in favor of Grimm’s claim was not entitled to deference from the court.  He wrote that deferring to the position articulated in the letter would allow OCR to “create a de facto new regulation.”   Doumar opined that if OCR wanted to change the regulation, it should go through the procedures set out in the Administrative Procedure Act, a time-consuming process that would result in a new or amended regulation that would then be subject to direct judicial review in the court of appeals.  As to the facts, Doumar referred to Grimm in his opinion as a “natal female” and seemingly was unwilling to credit the idea that for purposes of the law Grimm should be treated as a boy.  To Doumar, the case presented the simple question whether the school district had to let a girl use the boy’s restroom, and under the “clear” regulation the answer to that question was “No.”  While denying the preliminary injunction and dismissing the Title IX claim, Judge Doumar reserved judgment on the Equal Protection Claim.

Grimm appealed to the 4th Circuit, which reversed Judge Doumar in a 2-1 opinion on April 19, 2016.  Where Doumar saw clarity in the regulation, the 4th Circuit majority saw ambiguity, although a dissenting judge sided with Judge Doumar.  Although the regulation clearly said that schools could maintain separate restroom facilities for males and females, it said nothing directly about which restrooms transgender students could use, thus creating the ambiguity.  Unlike Judge Doumar, the 4th Circuit majority was unwilling to accept the School Board’s argument that a person’s sex is definitely established by their birth certificate.  The court took note of the developing case law in other circuits and in many district courts accepting the proposition that sex discrimination laws are concerned not just with genetic or “biological” sex but rather with the range of factors and characteristics that go into gender, including gender identity and expression.  Many federal courts (including several on the appellate level) have come to accept the proposition that gender identity and sex are inextricably related, that gender dysphoria and transgender identity are real phenomena that deeply affect the identity of people, and that transgender people are entitled to be treated consistent with their gender identity.  The court mentioned, in addition to the OCR letter, a December 2014 OCR publication setting forth the same view, which had been published on the Department of Education’s website.  Thus, the School District’s questioning of deference to an “unpublished letter” was not entirely factual, as the Department had previously published its interpretation on its website, and it was relying on an earlier ruling under Title VII by the EEOC in the Macy employment discrimination case, which was issued in 2012.

Having found that the regulation was ambiguous as to the issue before the court, the 4th Circuit relied on Auer v. Robbins, 519 U.S. 452 (1997), a Supreme Court decision holding that an agency’s interpretation of its own ambiguous regulation should be given controlling weight by the court unless the interpretation is “plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation or statute.”  In other words, a reasonable agency interpretation of an ambiguous regulation should be deferred to by the court.  The 4th Circuit panel majority went on to find that the requirements of Auer were met in this case, and remanded the matter to Judge Doumar to reconsider his ruling.  The court’s discussion made clear what direction the reconsideration should take and stressed urgency. Judge Doumar reacted with alacrity, issuing the requested preliminary injunction on June 23.  The School Board sought a stay, which was denied by both Judge Doumar and the 4th Circuit, which also denied a petition for rehearing en banc. With the new school year looming, and desperate to avoid having to let Grimm use the boys’ restrooms during his final year of high school, the School Board petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay of the preliminary injunction, which was granted on August 3 by a vote of 5-3.  See 136 S. Ct. 2442.  Justice Stephen Breyer, taking the unusual step of issuing a brief statement explaining why he had voted for the stay along with the four more conservative members of the Court; said it was an “accommodation.”  There was speculation at the time about what that meant.  In light of the October 28 vote to grant the School District’s petition for certiorari, it probably meant that the four conservatives had indicated they would likely vote to grant a petition for certiorari to review the 4th Circuit’s decision, so in Breyer’s view it made sense to delay implementing the injunction and to preserve the status quo, as the case would eventually be placed on the Court’s active docket for the October 2016 Term (which runs through June 2017).  Breyer was careful to refrain from expressing any view about the merits in his brief statement.  After the School Board filed its petition for certiorari on August 29, the case generated considerable interest, attracting more than a dozen amicus briefs in support or opposition to the petition, including briefs from many states and from members of Congress.  There will undoubtedly be heavy media interest when the parties file their merits briefs with the Court, accompanied by numerous amicus briefs on both sides of the case.

The School Board’s petition to the Court posed three questions, first asking whether the %Auer% doctrine, which some of the Justices have signaled a desire to overrule, should be reconsidered; second asking whether under the Auer doctrine “an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought” merits deference; and third asking whether the Department’s interpretation of Title IX and the bathroom regulation should be “given effect”?  The Court granted the petition only as to the second and third questions, so there are not four members of the Court ready to reconsider Auer, at least in the context of this case.

The remaining questions give the Court different paths to a decision, one of which has minimal substantive doctrinal significance, while others could make this a landmark ruling on the possible application of federal sex discrimination statutes and regulations to discrimination claims by sexual minorities.

The Court might agree with the School Board that no deference is due to an agency position formulated in response to a particular case and expressed in an unpublished agency letter. This could result in a remand to the 4th Circuit for a new determination of whether Judge Doumar’s dismissal of the Title IX claim was correct in the absence of any need to defer to the agency’s interpretation, a question as to which the 4th Circuit majority has already signaled an answer in its discussion of the merits.

Alternatively, and more efficiently in terms of the development of the law, the Court could take on the substantive issue and decide, at the least, whether interpreting Title IX to extend to gender identity discrimination claims is a viable interpretation, in light of the Court’s seminal ruling in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989), that an employer’s use of sex stereotypes to the disadvantage of an employee’s promotion application was evidence of intentional discrimination because of sex.  It was that ruling that eventually led federal courts to conclude that because transgender people generally do not conform to sex stereotypes concerning their “biological” sex as determined at birth, discrimination against them is a form of “sex discrimination” in violation of such federal laws as the Fair Credit Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.  The EEOC also relied on Price Waterhouse in reaching its conclusion that transgender plaintiffs could assert discrimination claims under Title VII, and the 6th and 11th Circuits have relied on it in finding that claims of gender identity discrimination by public employees should be treated the same as sex discrimination claims under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Were the Supreme Court to rule by majority vote that laws banning discrimination “because of sex” also “necessarily” cover discrimination because of gender identity, rather than issuing a narrower ruling focusing solely on Title IX, one could plausibly assert that the inclusion of “gender identity” in the pending Equality Act bill would not be, strictly speaking, necessary in order to establish a federal policy against gender identity discrimination under all federal sex discrimination laws. But it is possible that the Court might write a more narrowly focused decision that would in some way be logically restricted to Title IX claims. At least one district court, in a case involving a transgender student at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested that there were significant enough differences between workplaces and educational institutions to merit a different approach under Title VII and Title IX, especially noting that many of the students affected by Title IX are not adults, while most people affected by Title VII are older, more experienced, and less susceptible to psychological injury in the realm of sexual development.  There was the suggestion that sexual privacy concerns in the context of an educational institution are different from such concerns in the context of an adult workplace.  The Supreme Court has generally preferred to decide statutory interpretation cases on narrow grounds, so it is possible that a merits decision in this case would not necessarily decide how other sex discrimination laws should be construed.

This case will most likely be argued early in 2017, and it may not be decided until the end of the Court’s term in June. Thus, it is possible that Gavin Grimm could win but never personally benefit as a student at Gloucester County’s high school, since he may have completed his studies before the final decision is issued.  But, of course, if he goes on to college, a winning decision would personally benefit him in being able to use men’s restrooms if he attends a college subject to Title IX – unless, given another complication of our times, he decides to attend a religious school that raises theological objections to letting him use such facilities and seeks to rely on the Hobby Lobby decision to avoid complying with Title IX.  We suspect, however, that his higher education would likely avoid that complication!

The Supreme Court has not granted as many petitions as usual thus far this fall, leading to speculation that it is trying to avoid granting review in cases where the justices might be predictably split evenly on the outcome and thus would not be able to render a precedential decision. If the Senate Republicans stand firm on their position that President Obama’s nominee for the vacant seat, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland, will not be considered for confirmation, it is possible that the Court will have only eight justices when the Gloucester case is argued.  A tie vote by the Court would leave the 4th Circuit’s decision in place, but it would not be precedential outside of the 4th Circuit.  If a newly-elected president nominates a new candidate and the confirmation process takes the average time of several months, a new justice would probably not be seated in time to participate in deciding this case, unless the Court voted to hold it over for re-argument.  (In the past, the Court has sometimes held new arguments in cases that were heard when the Court was shorthanded.  This happened once when Justice Lewis Powell missed many arguments due to ill health, and his colleagues left it up to him whether to participate in those cases, in some instances by holding new arguments.)  This raises the possibility that Grimm’s graduation from high school might be found to have mooted the case, resulting in a dismissal on jurisdictional grounds.  This wouldn’t be an issue, of course, had the lawsuit been filed by DOE and the Justice Department, but where the plaintiff is an individual, his standing remains an issue throughout consideration of the case.

The Packingham Case

In the Packingham case, the North Carolina Supreme Court, reversing a decision by the state’s court of appeals, held that a state law restricting certain on-line social media use by all registered sex offenders was neither facially unconstitutional nor unconstitutional as applied to the defendant, Lester Gerard Packingham.  The North Carolina court, which divided 5-2 on the case, concluded that the statute was a regulation of conduct that incidentally affects freedom of speech, thus subject to heightened but not strict scrutiny, and that it survived such review due to the state’s important interest in protecting minors from sexual exploitation and to the measures taken by the legislature to narrow the scope of on-line communications that would be affected.

Packingham was convicted in 2002 of a sexual offense involving a minor. The opinion for the Supreme Court by Justice Robert H. Edmunds, Jr., does not specify the nature of the offense, but a reference in the dissenting opinion suggests it did not involve violence.  He did, however, have to register as a sex offender.  In 2008, the state legislature amended the sex offender registration law to make it a crime for a registered sex offender to “access a commercial social networking Web site where the sex offender knows that the site permits minor children to become members or to create or maintain personal Web pages on the commercial social networking Web site.”  The statute included a detailed definition of the characteristics of the kinds of sites that would be prohibited, and explicitly exempted various kinds of websites.  In effect, the ban is on sites where a registered sex offender might be able to identify and communicate directly with minors.  Sites that require individuals to be at least 18 years old in order to be members would not be affected by the ban, for example, and those that limited their services to things like commercial transactions for selling goods were also exempted.  After the law was passed, a written notice was sent to all registered sex offenders in the state advising of these new restrictions to which they must comply.  There was evidence in this case that Packingham received the notice.

In 2010 a Durham police officer began an investigation to determine whether any local registered sex offenders were violating the new law. His investigation uncovered the fact that Packingham was maintaining a facebook.com page under an assumed name and had posted messages to it, most recently a message celebrating his escape from traffic ticket liability.  The investigation did not, apparently, uncover any communications by Packingham to minors using facebook.com.  Packingham was indicted for violating the statute, and moved to dismiss the charges on 1st Amendment grounds.  The trial judge denied the motion, finding the statute constitutional as applied to Packingham while declining to rule on Packingham’s facial challenge to the statute, and he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 6-8 months, suspended for a year while on probation.  Packingham appealed.  The court of appeals reversed, finding that the statute was unconstitutional on its face and as applied, too broadly sweeping in its effect on the free speech rights of registered sex offenders, and unduly vague.

The North Carolina Supreme Court totally rejected the court of appeals’ analysis. For one thing, the court found that the statute regulated conduct (the act of accessing the social media), not directly speech, although it clearly has an incidental effect on the ability of a sex offender to engage in speech activities using social media.  But the court decided that under the “heightened scrutiny” approach for evaluating regulations of conduct that incidentally affect speech, this statute survived because of the important state interest in protecting children, and the legislature’s care in tailoring the prohibition to focus on the kinds of social media where those so inclined could identify and communicate with minors.  The court concluded that this left open a wide variety of social media and other internet forums in which sex offenders were free to participate, and that the statute (and the notices to sex offenders) were written in such a way that somebody who sought to comply with the statute could determine which social media were off-limits.  Nobody disputed that accessing facebook.com was prohibited under this law, for example, and the court concluded that Packingham knew that facebook.com was off-limits for him, as reflected by his opening an account in an assumed name.  (What gave him away was that his photograph on the site matched the photographic depiction on his sex offender registration form.)  The court acknowledged that several similar laws in other states had been declared unconstitutionally, but sought to distinguish them as not being as fine-tuned as the North Carolina law in terms of the kinds of websites that were made off-limits.

The dissent was written by Justice Robin E. Hudson, joined by Justice Cheri Beasley. She disputed the majority’s conclusion that this was a regulation of conduct, but she determined that didn’t make much difference because she concluded that even under the standard of review used by the majority, the statute failed as overly broad and vague.  Restricting all sex offenders without regard to the nature of their offenses, for example, undercut the state’s justification of protecting minors.  Many people are required to register who committed offenses that do not involve minors, and who have no sexual interest in minors. Why, then, is the state restricting their 1st Amendment activities if its articulated justification for the restriction is to protect minors?  She also pointed out that there is no requirement that their offense leading to registration status involved using a computer, so why is their computer access being restricted?  Further, she contested the majority’s conclusion about how narrowly tailored the restriction is.  She pointed out that, literally applied, it could bar somebody from using amazon.com, because that website makes it possible for users to create profile pages including contact information facilitating communications between users with common interests.  Indeed, she pointed out that some websites allow minors to register with the approval of their parents.  One such is the largest circulation daily newspaper in North Carolina, so theoretically Packingham could be barred from accessing the newspaper on-line.  She argued that the law is both facially unconstitutional and unconstitutional as applied to Packingham.

In petitioning the Supreme Court for review, Packingham’s counsel wrote: “The statute singles out a subclass of persons, who are subject to criminal punishment based on expressive, associational, and communicative activities at the heart of the First Amendment, without any requirement that their activity caused any harm or was intended to.” The certiorari grant extends to the questions of whether the law is facially unconstitutional or just unconstitutional as applied to Packingham.  The case has the potential to bring into question numerous state laws that seek to regulate the expressive activities of sex offenders in the name of protecting minors.  Nobody argues that the state does not have a significant interest in protecting minors from sexual exploitation, or that the internet has created new opportunities for adults who are sexually interested in minors to locate and communicate with them.  At issue is how broadly such laws may sweep.  Should the laws pay more attention to the nature of sex offenses leading to registration in deciding whose activities should be restricted, and how narrowly tailored must the restrictions be to avoid subjecting individuals to long-term (even life-long in some cases) restrictions on their ability to use one of the main vehicles for communication in the 21st century without substantial justification for the limitation.  The petition was supported by an amicus brief from professors concerned with the law’s substantial burden they perceived on communicative freedom imposed by the statute.  Interestingly, N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper did not want to bother responding to the certiorari petition, and filed a waiver of the right to respond on April 6, but then was requested to respond after the amicus brief was filed, and ultimately filed a response on June 30.

The interests of LGBT people are significantly implicated by this dispute. Even after the Supreme Court declared in 2003 that laws against gay sex were not enforceable against individuals engaged in private, adult consensual activities, there is a not inconsiderable number of gay people, especially men, who are still affected by sex registration requirements in many states based on pre-2003 criminal convictions and continuing enforcement of laws involving solicitation, conduct in public, prostitution, and, of course, intergenerational sex.  Many offender registration laws sweep broadly encompassing a wide variety of activity that is not specifically protected under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling, and litigation is ongoing challenging the continued registration requirements imposed in some jurisdictions on people whose offender status is based on pre-Lawrence convictions for conduct that may no longer be criminalized.  In this connection it is notable that there are still several states that have not legislatively reformed their sex crimes laws to comply with the Lawrence ruling, as a result of which law enforcement officials continue to make arrests for constitutionally protected conduct.