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Federal Appeals Court Upholds Constructive Discharge of Teacher Who Mis-Gendered Trans Students

Posted on: April 11th, 2023 by Art Leonard No Comments

A three judge panel of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled on April 7 that the Brownsburg (Indiana) Community School Corporation did not violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it told a music teacher at the district’s high school that if he refused to comply with the district’s policy regarding names and pronouns for transgender students he should quit or would be fired.  Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corp., 2023 WL 2821871, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS 8328 (7th Cir., April 7, 2023).

The teacher, John M. Kluge, protested the policy on religious grounds when it was first announced. He and three other teachers approached the high school’s principal, Dr. Bret Daghe, presenting a seven-page letter expressing their religious objections to “transgenderism,” arguing that the school “should not treat gender dysphoria as a protected status, and urged the school not to require teachers to refer to transgender students by the names or pronouns that the teachers deemed inconsistent with the students’ sex recorded at birth,” wrote Circuit Judge Ilana Rovner in her opinion for the majority of the panel.

The school maintained an official student database, called “Power-School,” which included names and gender markers, preferred pronouns and other data.  Kluge claims that Dr. Daghe told the teachers that he had resisted pressure to change the students’ names in Power-School, but that he “would make this change if it would resolve the teachers’ concerns regarding how to address transgender students,” Kluge later testified.  The other three teachers who had signed Kluge’s letter agreed to use the names and pronouns as shown in the Power-School database, but Kluge hanged tough, insisting that he had a right to assert his religious views and refuse to comply.  Somehow, Kluge walked away from the meeting thinking that he had Dr. Daghe’s permission to continue using students’ “legal names” and that “we would not be promoting transgenderism in our school.”

He was mistaken, according to Dr. Daghe, as the district leadership decided to require teachers to use the PowerSchool names and pronouns.  Transgender students could change their names and pronouns in PowerSchool by presenting two letters, one from a parent and one from a healthcare professional, regarding the need for changes.  Assistant Superintendent Dr. Kathryn Jessup explained in testimony that this fulfilled two goals: it established a clear rule for faculty members to follow, and “it afforded dignity and showed empathy toward transgender students who were considering or in the process of gender transition.”  The leadership considered it “important for transgender students to receive, like any other student, respect and affirmation of their preferred identity, provided they go through the required and reasonable channels of receiving and providing proof of parental permission and a healthcare professional’s approval.”

This policy was communicated to teachers by a guidance counselor using emails at the beginning of the 2017-18 school year, and Kluge was notified that that he would have two transgender students in his music classes.  He expressed shock, and interpreted the emails as being “permissive, not mandatory,” determined to use only “legal names” for his students.  He met with Dr. Daghe, once again raising his religious objections.  After consulting the Superintendent of Schools, Daghe told Kluge that he had three options:  comply with the policy, resign, or be suspended pending termination.  When he refused either to comply or resign, he was suspended and sent home.  When he came back to the school a few days later to meet with administrators, he was presented with a written directive requiring him to state either that he would or would not comply with the school’s rule.

Kluge responded by proposing an “accommodation” to his religious beliefs.  He wanted to be allowed to address all students by their last names and not use pronouns, and to have somebody else hand out the gender-specific uniforms for students in the orchestra.  This was agreed to, but in the long run, it didn’t work out because it became obvious to the students what was going on.  The transgender students felt demeaned and many of their classmates were upset as well.  Other teachers expressed concern.  Kluge slipped up at times and was inconsistent in his naming and pronoun practices.  The faculty advisor to the school’s “Equality Alliance Club” reported to Dr. Daghe that complaints about Kluge were frequently voiced at club meetings.  Parents of transgender students complained to the school in writing as well.  Non-transgender students reported that the way Kluge was acting was making them uncomfortable.  One transgender student was so upset that he ended up withdrawing from the orchestra program entirely.

This summary of what happened drastically truncates the lengthy and detailed narrative provided by Judge Rovner in her opinion, a factual record that led a majority of the appellate panel to conclude that the school had a legitimate basis to go back to Kluge at the end of the school year and inform him that the “accommodation” was not working, and that he would have to resign or he would be fired.  He resigned under protest and filed this lawsuit

Represented by lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the conservative religious law firm, Kluge sued the Brownsburg school corporation in the Indiana federal district court, claiming violations of the Constitution and invoking the statutory ban on religious discrimination under Title VII.  District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson dismissed Kluge’s constitutional claims and various other state law claims, and ruled against Kluge’s claim that his forced resignation violated his rights under Title VII, either as outright discrimination or as retaliation for his protest against the school’s policy.

Kluge appealed only his Title VII discrimination and retaliation claims, so the 7th Circuit decision does not address the constitutional claims.   Title VII makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate against an employee because of his religion, and requires employers to “reasonably accommodate” an employee’s religious beliefs and practices.  The duty of reasonable accommodation is limited by Supreme Court precedents, however.  An accommodation that would impose an “undue hardship” on the employer’s business cannot be required.  The statute also prohibits an employer from retaliating against an employee for engaging in activity protected under the statute.

The district court concluded that Kluge established a prima facie case of failure to accommodate his religious belief, but that the school had proven that Kluge’s naming/pronoun accommodation imposed an “undue hardship” on the school’s “business,” and the majority of the 7th Circuit panel agreed.

“As a public school,” wrote Judge Rovner, “Brownsburg’s ‘business’ is its constitutional and statutory charge to educate all students who enter its doors.”  The court described students as a “captive audience” because education is “compulsory.”  Students must attend public school unless their parents are willing to pay for private schools or make the time commitment for home schooling.  The court quoted from an earlier decision “noted in the First Amendment context”: “Children who attend school because they must ought not be subject to teachers’ idiosyncratic perspectives.”  It should be up to the politically accountable school boards (or in the case of this school district, the elected trustees of the education corporation), not the teachers, to determine issues about what goes on in the classrooms.  “At least the board’s views can be debated openly,” the court had written, “and the people may choose to elect persons committed to neutrality on contentious issues.  The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials.”

Here, the school claimed that Kluge’s naming practices, including the so-called last name accommodation, had imposed two undue hardships on the school: first, it “frustrated” the school’s efforts to “educate all students” because it “negatively impacted students and the learning environment for transgender students and other students as well”; and second, it exposed the school district to potential loss of federal funding and damages if transgender students filed discrimination claims with the federal government under Title IX, a law that prohibits discrimination because of sex against students at schools that receive federal funds.  At the time of this lawsuit, the 7th Circuit had recently ruled in a lawsuit by a transgender boy excluded from the boys’ restrooms in another Indiana school district, holding that this violated Title IX.  Thus, 7th Circuit precedent supported the school’s concern about potential liability if it allowed Kluge to continue his contested practices.

Judge Rovner declared, “A practice that indisputedly caused emotional harm to students and disruptions to the learning environment is an undue hardship to a school as a matter of law.”  The court also found that there was no other accommodation available in this case, because Kluge was the school’s only music teacher, so students could not be transferred to another classroom to be able to participate in the music program without having to deal with Kluge (and, the court commented, “if we assume that transfer to another classroom would not be equally stigmatizing”).

As to Kluge’s retaliation claim, the court found that he “failed to produce evidence that established a but-for causal link between protected activity and the adverse action, and so failed to make out a prima facie case of retaliation.”  The court found Kluge’s briefing on this point insufficient, failing to cite relevant evidence for his claim, for example, that he was subjected to a “hostile environment” because of his religious beliefs after he protested the naming policy during the summer of 2017.  And, of course, the school’s “undue hardship” defense would counter any liability for retaliation, because the court found that the school was justified in revoking the “accommodation” agreement, having correctly concluded that it was not working.

Judge Michael Brennan agreed with the majority of the panel on the retaliation claim, but he dissented from the ruling on direct Title VII liability, arguing that the religious accommodation claim “comes down to a fact-intensive inquiry: Did the School District demonstrate that Kluge’s gender-neutral accommodation of calling all student by only their last name causes undue hardship – that is, more than a de minimis cost?  The majority opinion says ‘yes,’ but it sidesteps Kluge’s countervailing evidence, failed to construe the record in his favor, and overlooks credibility issues on both sides, which are reserved for resolution by the factfinder.”  Brennan argued that there should have been a trial to determine whether Kluge’s “accommodation” had actually posed an undue hardship.  Judge Rovner’s opinion sharply disputed this, finding the record overwhelming supported the school’s decision to end the “accommodation agreement.”

This panel opinion may not be the last word on Kluge’s discrimination claim.  ADF has a practice of appealing any adverse ruling as far as they can take it, since it is a policy-driven organization that is dedicated to establishing maximum religious freedom through the courts.

This three-judge panel was made up entirely of judges appointed by Republican presidents.  Judge Rovner was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, while both Judge Brennan and the other judge on the panel, Amy St. Eve, were appointed by President Trump.  ADF may seek reconsideration by the full ten-judge 7th Circuit bench, which tips 7-3 in Republican appointees. (There is one vacancy in this Circuit, and President Biden has not announced a nomination for the vacant seat.)

ADF might alternatively directly seek Supreme Court review.  This term the Court is reconsidering the issue of religious accommodation in another case.  If ADF were to file a petition with the Court, is likely that the Court would delay deciding whether to grant the petition until it releases an opinion in the other case and if, as widely expected, the Court’s decision strengthens the accommodation requirement, to then send this case back to the lower courts for reconsideration in light of the new standard.

 

Federal Appeals Court Says University Professor May Have 1st Amendment Right to Misgender Transgender Students

Posted on: March 29th, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, was very concerned in 2016 when the University announced that its ban on gender identity discrimination would require professors to respect students’ gender identity by using appropriate pronouns to refer to them.  Meriwether, a devout Christian who rejects the idea that people can have a different gender identity than their genetic sex, protested to his department chair, who ridiculed his religious beliefs and told him to comply with the rule.  Now a federal appeals court panel has ruled that the Meriwether could have a 1st Amendment right to insist on misgendering transgender students based on his religious beliefs.  Meriwether v. Hartop, 2021 WL 1149377, 2021 U.S. App. LEXIS 8876 (6th Cir., March 26, 2021).

According to his federal court complaint, Meriwether says that the department chair exhibited hostility toward him and his beliefs during their meeting, stating that “adherents to the Christian religion are primarily motivated out of fear”; “the Christian doctrines regarding hell are harmful and should not be taught”; “anyone who believes hell exists should not be allowed to teach these doctrines”; “faculty members who adhere to a certain religion should be banned from teaching courses regarding that religion”; and “the presence of religion in higher education is counterproductive” because “the purpose of higher education is to liberate students” and “religion oppresses students.”

Meriwether, who had taught at Shawnee for 35 years, confronted the issue up-close in January 2018 when he returned from a semester on sabbatical leave and discovered, undoubtedly to his chagrin, that there was a transgender woman in his class, who is identified in the litigation as “Doe.”  Meriwether, believing Doe to be male, addressed Doe as “sir” in response to a comment Doe made in class discussion.  After the class, Doe approached Meriwether and advised him that Doe was a woman and should be addressed accordingly.  Doe threatened to file a complaint against Meriwether if he did not address her as female.

This led ultimately to the University putting a disciplinary note and warning in Meriwether’s file when he failed to abide by instructions to consistently address Doe as a woman or to just to use her last name when calling on or referring to her.  He tried to restrain himself from addressing Doe incorrectly, but slipped up on occasion, quickly correcting himself.  He told one administrator that he would be willing to comply with the rule by referring to Doe consistently as female if he could put an explanatory statement in his course Syllabus setting forth his religious views, but he was told that would itself violate the anti-discrimination rule.

Doe filed at least two complaints with University administrators against Meriwether, leading to findings that he had created a hostile environment for Doe, which he tried to refute by claiming that Doe had participated actively and well in class discussion and earned a high grade in his course.  Meriwether appealed these rulings and claimed that when his union representative tried to explain Meriwether’s religious freedom argument to the University President, that official just laughed and refused to listen.

U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott referred the University’s motion to dismiss Meriwether’s 1st Amendment lawsuit to a Magistrate Judge, Karen L. Litkovitz, who issued a Report and Recommendation in 2019 concluding that the case should be dismissed, because Meriwether’s failure to comply with the University’s rule did not involve constitutionally protected speech.  In January 2020, Judge Dlott issued a brief opinion agreeing with Litkovitz’s recommendation and dismissing the case.  Meriwether, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a staunchly anti-LGBT religious litigation group, appealed to the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which reversed Judge Dlott’s ruling on March 26, reviving the lawsuit and sending it back to the District Court for trial.

Judge Dlott’s decision adopting Judge Litkovitz’s recommendation to dismiss the case was based heavily on Garcetti v. Ceballos, a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that held, by a vote of 5-4, that when government employees speak or write as part of their job, their speech is “government speech” that is not protected by the 1st Amendment.  As Justice Anthony Kennedy interpreted the Court’s free speech precedents, an individual is protected by the 1st Amendment’s freedom of speech when they are speaking as a citizen on a matter of public concern, but not when they are speaking as a government official.  The case concerned a prosecuting attorney who claimed to have suffered unconstitutional retaliation for an internal memo he wrote and some testimony he gave in a criminal court hearing that met with disapproval from his supervisors.  The Supreme Court held that neither his memo nor his testimony enjoyed 1st Amendment protection because he was speaking as part of his job as a government official.

In a dissent, Justice David Souter raised the specter of censorship of public university professors who are employed to engage in scholarship and teaching and who would theoretically be deprived of academic freedom under such a rule.  Justice Kennedy responded in his opinion by acknowledging the academic freedom concern and observing that the Court was not deciding that issue in the Garcetti case.  Lower federal courts have been divided about the impact of Garcetti in cases involving educators seeking 1st Amendment protection for their speech.

In her opinion, Judge Litkovitz found that Professor Meriwether’s use of inappropriate terminology to refer to Doe was not protected speech, relying in part upon the Garcetti reasoning, and Judge Dlott accepted her conclusion.  But the 6th Circuit panel (which included two judges appointed by President Donald J. Trump) decisively rejected that view.

Writing for the unanimous panel, Circuit Judge Amul Roger Thapar seized upon Justice Souter’s dissent and Justice Kennedy’s acknowledgement that academic freedom concerns could create an exception to the Garcetti rule and insisted that Professor Meriwether’s claim that the University violated his 1st Amendment rights by disciplining him for his use of words in dealing with Doe should not have been dismissed.

“Under controlling Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedent, the First Amendment protects the academic speech of university professors,” wrote Judge Thapar. “Since Meriwether has plausibly alleged that Shawnee State violated his First Amendment rights by compelling his speech or silence and casting a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom, his free-speech claim may proceed.”  The court insisted that the words Meriwether used reflected his religiously-based beliefs about gender, and as spoken in the classroom were part of his teaching and were thus communicating his point of view about a hotly debated and controversial subject of public concern.  As such, they enjoy 1st Amendment protection under the free speech provision.

Furthermore, pointing out the hostility with which Meriwether’s department chair and the University president had responded to his religiously-based arguments, the court relied on the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling to find that his right to free exercise of religion also came into play in this case.  If speech on an issue of public concern enjoys 1st Amendment protection, then the University’s disciplinary action of placing a warning letter in Meriwether’s personnel file and threatening him with more severe sanctions for future violations would be subject to “strict scrutiny,” which means the University and those officials named as individual defendants would have the burden to show that there is a compelling justification for their actions and that the “accommodations” that Meriwether had suggested would defeat the University’s attempt to achieve its compelling goal.

In this case, the University’s justification lies in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which provides that schools receiving federal funding may not deprive any individual of equal educational opportunity because of sex.  In 2016, the Obama Administration informed the educational community that it interpreted that language to ban gender identity discrimination, and published a guidance document that instructed, among other things, that transgender students have a right to be treated consistent with their gender identity, including appropriate use of language in speaking to and about them.

The University argued that the 6th Circuit’s decision in the Harris Funeral Homes case, which later became part of the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling, had confirmed its compelling interest in preventing discrimination against transgender students.  In that case, the 6th Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court, held that the ban on sex discrimination in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to an employer’s discharge of a transgender employee when she announced her transition.

Judge Thapar rejected the argument.  “Harris does not resolve this case,” he insisted. “There, a panel of our court held that an employer violates Title VII when it takes an adverse employment action based on an employee’s transgender status.  The panel did not hold—and indeed, consistent with the First Amendment, could not have held—that the government always has a compelling interest in regulating employees’ speech on matters of public concern . . . . [It] would allow universities to discipline professors, students, and staff any time their speech might cause offense. That is not the law. Purportedly neutral non-discrimination policies cannot be used to transform institutions of higher learning into ‘enclaves of totalitarianism.’”

Furthermore, he wrote, “a requirement that an employer not fire an employee for expressing a transgender identity is a far cry from what we have here—a requirement that a professor affirmatively change his speech to recognize a person’s transgender identity.”

“At this stage of the litigation,” wrote Thapar, “there is no suggestion that Meriwether’s speech inhibited his duties in the classroom, hampered the operation of the school, or denied Doe any educational benefits. Without such a showing, the school’s actions ‘mandate orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination,’ and ignore the fact that ‘[t]olerance is a two-way street.’”  He also rejected the argument that how Meriwether addressed Doe in the classroom deprived her of educational opportunity, pointing out Meriwether’s claim that Doe was an active participant in class discussion and earned a “high grade” in his course.

Thapar supported this view by noting that University President Jeffrey A. Bauer, in confirming the disciplinary decision, had conceded that Meriwether did not create a hostile environment for Doe, instead resting his decision on the assertion that Meriwether discriminated against Doe by addressing cisgender students consistent with their gender identity but not address Doe consistent with her gender identity.  Thus, Judge Thapar concluded, disciplining Doe was not necessary to effectuate Title IX’s policy of protecting educational opportunity.

The court’s opinion lacks any kind of discussion or understanding concerning the concept of “misgendering” and the harm that inflicts on transgender individuals.  In the court’s view, the victim here is Professor Meriwether, not Doe.  This reflects the same cavalier attitude towards misgendering recently displayed in a 5th Circuit decision denying a request by a transgender prisoner that she be referred to consistent with her gender identity in court papers, also treated dismissively by a Trump-appointed appeals court judge.  And it calls to mind a recent ruling by the 11th Circuit striking down on 1st Amendment free speech grounds an attempt by Florida municipalities to protect LGBT youth from the practice of conversion therapy, yet another opinion by a Trump-appointed judge.  The Trump Administration may technically be at an end, but it lives on in his appointment of a third of the active federal appeals court judges.

The only point on which the 6th Circuit panel affirmed Judge Dlott’s ruling was in her conclusion rejecting Meriwether’s argument that the University’s rule was too vague to meet Due Process standards.  The 6th Circuit panel found that Prof. Meriwether was clearly advised of the rule and was accorded Due Process, while finding fault with the lack of neutrality towards religion exhibited by his department chair and President Bauer.  The court ordered that Judge Dlott’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit be vacated, and that the case sent back to the district court for proceedings consistent with the 6th Circuit’s opinion.

 

 

United States Supreme Court Refuses to Review Transgender Bathroom Case from Boyertown, Pennsylvania

Posted on: May 28th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

The Supreme Court announced on May 28 that it will not review a decision by the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, which had rejected a constitutional and statutory challenge by cisgender students at Boyertown (Pennsylvania) Senior High School, who were upset that the School District decided to let transgender students use facilities consistent with their gender identity.  Doe v. Boyertown Area School District & Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, 897 F.3d 518 (3rd Cir. 2018), cert. denied, 2019 WL 2257330 (May 28, 2019).

The federal lawsuit stemmed from a decision in 2016 by the School District to permit transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.  Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and local attorneys affiliated with the Independence Law Center in Harrisburg filed suit on behalf of several cisgender students, proceeding under pseudonyms, contending that this decision violated their rights on three theories: constitutional right of bodily privacy under the 14th Amendment, creation of a “hostile environment” in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans sex discrimination by schools that get federal funds, and violation of the right of privacy under Pennsylvania state common law.  Upon filing their complaint, the plaintiffs asked U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith (E.D. Pa.) to issue a preliminary injunction to block the school district’s policy while the case was pending.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the ACLU’s National LGBT Rights Project joined the case, representing the Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, which intervened as a co-defendant to help the School District defend its policy.

This case is part of a national campaign by ADF to preserve and defend restrictions on restroom and locker room use by transgender students, part of ADF’s overall goal – consistent with the Trump Administration’s anti-transgender policies – to deprive transgender people of any protection under federal law.  So far, ADF has lost a succession of “bathroom” cases, and the 3rd Circuit’s ruling in this case was one of its most notable defeats.  At the same time, however, the Education Department under the leadership of Trump’s appointee, Betsy De Vos, has reversed the Obama Administration’s policy and now refuses to investigate discrimination claims by transgender students under Title IX, leaving it up to individuals to file lawsuits seeking protection under the statute.

Judge Smith refused to issue the requested preliminary injunction on August 25, 2017, 276 F. Supp. 3d 324, writing an extensive decision that concluded that the plaintiffs were unlikely to prevail on the merits of any of their theories, and that mere exposure to transgender students was not going to impose an irreparable injury on them anyway.   Judge Smith was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013, but it was noteworthy that at his Senate confirmation vote, he received more votes from Republican Senators than Democratic Senators.

Plaintiffs appealed to the 3rd Circuit, and suffered a loss before a unanimous three judge panel, which issued its decision on June 18, 2018.  The opinion was written by Circuit Judge Theodore McKee, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.  The other judges on the panel were Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz, who was appointed by President Obama to fill the vacancy created by Circuit Judge Marion Trump Barry, President Trump’s sister, when she took senior status; and Senior Circuit Judge Richard Nygaard, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

Judge McKee’s opinion set the stage with an extended discussion of gender identity based on the expert testimony offered by defendants in opposition to the motion for preliminary relief, including a much-cited amicus brief by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, which stated that policies excluding transgender students from “privacy facilities” consistent with their gender identities “have detrimental effects on the physical and mental health, safety, and well-being of transgender individuals.”  Judge McKee also quoted from an amicus brief filed by National PTA and Gay-Lesbian-Straight Education Network (GLSEN), that forcing transgender students to use bathrooms or locker rooms that don’t match their gender identity causes “severe psychological distress often leading to attempted suicide.”  In other words, the starting point for the court’s discussion was that the School District’s policy was responding to a serious problem faced by transgender students.

The court noted that as part of its policy the School District had renovated its “privacy facilities” to increase the privacy of individual users, and had provided single-user restrooms open to any student so that students who did not want to share facilities with others because of their gender identity would not be forced to do so.   The District also required that students claiming to be transgender meet with counselors trained to address the issue, and go through a process of being approved to use facilities consistent with their gender identity.  “Once a transgender student was approved to use the bathroom or locker room that aligned with his or her gender identity,” wrote Judge McKee, “the student was required to use only those facilities,” although any student was allowed to use the single-user restrooms.  “The student could no longer use the facilities corresponding to that student’s birth sex.”

The plaintiffs claimed that their right to privacy was violated because the school’s policy permitted them to be viewed by members of the opposite sex while partially clothed.  The 3rd Circuit found that Judge Smith “correctly found that this would not give rise to a constitutional violation because the School District’s policy served a compelling interest – to prevent discrimination against transgender students – and was narrowly tailored to that interest.”  The court pointed out that privacy rights under the Constitution are not absolute.  Furthermore, wrote McKee, “the School District’s policy fosters an environment of inclusivity, acceptance, and tolerance,” and that, as the National Education Association’s amicus brief “convincingly explains, these values serve an important educational function for both transgender and cisgender students.”

While the court empathized with cisgender students who experienced “surprise” at finding themselves “in an intimate space with a student they understood was of the opposite biological sex” – an experience specifically evoked in the plaintiffs’ brief in support of their motion – the court said, “We cannot, however, equate the situation the appellants now face with the very drastic consequences that the transgender students must endure if the school were to ignore the latter’s needs and concerns.”  And, the court pointed out, cisgender students “who feel that they must try to limit trips to the restroom to avoid contact with transgender students can use the single-user bathrooms in the school.”  The court rejected plaintiffs’ argument that the best solution to the issue was to require transgender students to use the handful of single-user restrooms, finding that this would “significantly undermine” the District’s compelling interest in treating transgender students in a non-discriminatory manner.

The court also pointed out that the plaintiffs’ privacy arguments sought to push that doctrine far beyond anything supported by existing case law. The court rejected analogies to cases involving inappropriate strip searches and peeping toms.  “Those cases involve inappropriate conduct as well as conduct that intruded into far more intimate aspects of human affairs than here.  There is simply nothing inappropriate about transgender students using the restrooms or locker rooms that correspond to their gender identity” under the School District’s policy, insisted the court, which also found that the “encounters” described by the plaintiffs did not involve transgender students doing “anything remotely out of the ordinary” while using the “privacy facilities” at the school.

As a result of these findings, the court concluded that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the merits of their privacy claims under Title IX, the Constitution, or Pennsylvania tort law.  Further, looking to “hostile environment sex discrimination” claims under Title IX (and the more developed hostile environment case law under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which covers employment discrimination and serves as a resource for courts interpreting Title IX), the court found that the possibility of encountering transgender students in a restroom failed to meet the high test set by the courts of “sexual harassment that is so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience that he or she is effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”  The possibility of occasionally encountering one of a handful of transgender students in a “privacy facility” fell far short of meeting that test.

Furthermore, the court found that the District’s policy was “sex-neutral” in that it applied to everybody, and asserted that plaintiffs had not “provided any authority” for the proposition that a “sex-neutral policy” would violate Title IX.  “The School District’s policy allows all students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity,” wrote McKee. “It does not discriminate based on sex, and therefore does not violate Title IX.”

The court drew support for its conclusion from the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Ash Whitaker’s lawsuit against the Kenosha, Wisconsin, school district, where the court found that excluding a transgender boy from using the boys’ restroom facilities did violate Title IX.  See Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District No. 1 Board of Education, 858 F.3d 1034 (7th Cir. 2017). Consistent with that ruling, the Boyertown School District’s policy could be seen as mandated by its obligation under Title IX to provide equal educational access and opportunities to transgender students.  The court also noted transgender rights rulings by the 1st, 6th, 9th and 11th Circuits, concluding that anti-transgender discrimination in a variety of contexts violates federal laws forbidding sex discrimination.  There is an emerging consensus among federal courts of appeals along these lines.  The validity of this reasoning will be up for Supreme Court debate next Term when the Court reviews the 6th Circuit’s decision in favor of Aimee Stephens, the transgender employment discrimination plaintiff in the Harris Funeral Homes case, to be argued in the fall.

The plaintiff’s petition to the Supreme Court to review the Boyertown decision posed two questions to the Court: “Whether a public school has a compelling interest in authorizing students who believe themselves to be members of the opposite sex to use locker rooms and restrooms reserved exclusively for the opposite sex, and whether such a policy is narrowly tailored,” and “Whether the Boyertown policy constructively denies access to locker room and restroom facilities under Title IX ‘on the basis of sex.’”  These questions were phrased by ADF to incorporate its religiously-based beliefs seeking to discredit the reality of transgender existence, similar to attempts by the Trump Administration in its proposed regulations and policy statements.  If the Court had been tempted to grant this petition, it would likely have reworded the “Questions Presented,” as it pointedly did when it granted ADF’s petition to review the Harris Funeral Homes decision on April 22.

Although the decision not to review a court of appeals case does not constitute a ruling on the merits by the Supreme Court and does not establish a binding precedent on lower courts, it sends a signal to the lower courts, the practicing bar, and the parties.  In this case, the signal is important for school districts to hear as they try to navigate between the rulings by courts in favor of transgender student claims and the Trump Administration’s reversal of Obama Administration policy on this issue.  The question whether Title IX mandates the Boyertown School District’s access policy was not squarely before the Court in this case, and the justices may have denied review because they were already committed to consider whether federal sex discrimination laws cover gender identity discrimination in the Harris Funeral Homes case.

The Court normally provides no explanation why it grants or denies a petition for review although, interestingly, in another announcement on May 28, the Court did provide such a rare explanation in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, 2019 WL 2257160 (Sup. Ct., May 28, 2019).  In Box, the Court denied review of a decision by the 7th Circuit striking down on constitutional grounds an Indiana law that prohibits health care providers from providing abortions that are motivated solely by the sex, race or disability of the fetus, stating: “Only the Seventh Circuit has thus far addressed this kind of law.  We follow our ordinary practice of denying petitions insofar as they raise legal issues that have not been considered by additional Courts of Appeals.”  The implication for the Boyertown case is that the 3rd Circuit opinion may have been denied review because it was the only federal appeals court ruling to address the precise question before the Court.

Impatient Christians File Suit Against EEOC’s Interpretation of Title VII and Seek Exemption from Recognizing Same-Sex Marriages

Posted on: April 3rd, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Pastor Council (on behalf of itself and others similarly situated), and Braidwood Management, Inc., a business claiming to have religious objections concerning the employment of LGBTQ people (on behalf of itself and others similarly situated), have jointly filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Fort Worth Division), seeking a declaratory judgment that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s interpretation of Title VII to protect LGBTQ people from employment discrimination violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment, and they seek to enjoin the federal government from enforcing these policies against any employer who objects to homosexual or transgender behavior on religious grounds.  U.S. Pastor Council & Braidwood Management Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Case No. 4:18-cv-00824-O (U.S. Dist. Ct., N.D. Texas, filed March 29, 2019).  They seek class certification and nation-wide injunctive relief.  Other named defendants include EEOC Chair Victoria A. Lipnic and Commissioner Charlotte A. Burrows, Attorney General William P. Barr, and the United States of America.  (Lipnic and Burrows are the only currently serving EEOC commissioners, as Trump’s nominees to fill three vacancies were not confirmed in the last session of the Senate, and the Commission as a body lacks a quorum to act at present.)

The headline’s reference to “impatient Christians” points to the Supreme Court’s unexplained delay in deciding whether to grant writs of certiorari in three pending cases that pose the question whether Title VII can be interpreted, as it has been by the EEOC and some circuit courts of appeals, to prohibit employment discrimination because of an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.  If the Supreme Court finally takes these cases and decides them during its October 2019 Term, this lawsuit could be at least partially mooted.  But the complaint ranges more broadly, tempting the court (and ultimately the Supreme Court) to reconsider two of its constitutional precedents that are not beloved by the Court’s current conservative majority: Employment Division v. Smith and Obergefell v. Hodges.

The docket number of the case indicates that it has been assigned to District Judge Reed O’Connor, which means that it is highly predictable that the plaintiffs will get much of the relief they are seeking from the district court.  In earlier lawsuits, Judge O’Connor issued nationwide injunctions against the federal government’s enforcement of Obamacare and Title IX in gender identity cases, disagreeing that the term “discrimination because of sex” could be construed to extend to gender identity.  See Franciscan Alliance v. Burwell, 227 F.Supp.3d 660 (N.D. Tex. Dec. 31, 2016) (Obamacare); Texas v. United States, 201 F. Supp. 3d 810 (N.D. Tex. 2016) (Title IX).  Since the current political appointees leading the Justice Department probably agree with the plaintiff’s position on all or most of the claims raised in this complaint, one reasonably suspects that any serious defense can only be mounted by Intervenors, and the government would only appeal pro-plaintiff rulings by Judge O’Connor in order to get a rubber stamp approval from the 5th Circuit on the way to the Supreme Court. Trump has worked hard to cement a conservative majority on the 5th Circuit, having quickly filled five of the vacancies preserved for him by the Senate’s refusal to confirm Obama nominees to the circuit courts.  A new vacancy waits to be filled, and more elderly Republican appointees on the circuit (two active Reagan appointees who have been there more than thirty years) are likely to retire soon enough.

The complaint’s first count argues that the government has no compelling reason to enforce a prohibition against discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity against employers with religious objections, and thus that the EEOC as a federal agency should be found to be precluded from doing so under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The second count argues that because Title VII exempts religious employers from its ban on religious discrimination, it is thereby not a law of “general applicability,” so Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), is “inapplicable” to the question whether imposing a non-discrimination obligation on employers who are subject to the statute (those with 15 or more employees) violates their constitutional Free Exercise rights under the 1st Amendment.  The complaint observes that the ministerial exemption to Title VII that the Supreme Court has found for religious institutions does not extend to businesses, and further does not extend to the non-ministerial employees of religious organizations, thus imposing a burden on both kinds of employers who are subject to Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination.  Furthermore, they argue that if the court disagrees with their characterization of Title VII and finds that Employment Division v. Smith would apply in their Free Exercise claim, that decision should be overruled (which, of course, the district court can’t do, but this lawsuit is obviously not intended to stop at the district court).  Justice Neil Gorsuch implied in his concurring opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop last June that the Supreme Court should reconsider this precedent.

In terms of the practical impact of the EEOC’s position, the complaint says in its third count that Braidwood Management’s benefits administrator has amended its employee benefits plans to recognize same-sex marriages, complying with guidance on the EEOC’s website, and Braidwood wants to instruct the administrator to return to a traditional marriage definition, consistent with the employer’s religious beliefs.  Thus, part of the declaratory judgment plaintiffs seek would proclaim that employers with religious beliefs against same-sex marriage should be allowed to refuse to recognize them for employee benefits purposes.  In several counts, the complaint tempts the court to declare as illegitimate the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, and to excuse religious organizations and businesses from having to recognize same-sex marriages, except possibly in states where same-sex marriage became available through state legislation, unlike Texas, where it exists by compulsion of the federal courts (and certainly against the wishes of the state government).

In terms of standing issues, Braidwood points out that the EEOC has actively enforced its interpretation of Title VII by bringing enforcement actions and filing amicus briefs in support of LGBTQ plaintiffs against employers with religious objections, most prominently in the Harris Funeral Home case, in which the EEOC sued a business that had discharged a transgender employee because of the employer’s religious objections.  The funeral home prevailed in the district court on a RFRA defense, the trial judge finding that in the absence of RFRA the funeral home would have been found in violation of Title VII.  However, the 6th Circuit reversed in part, rejecting the district court’s RFRA analysis and finding a Title VII violation.  The funeral home’s petition for certiorari was filed in the Supreme Court last July, but that Court had made no announcement regarding a grant or denial at the time this complaint was filed on March 29 – impatient Christians, again.

The fourth count claims that the EEOC’s requirement that employers post a notice to employees announcing their protection under Title VII is unconstitutionally compelled speech.  “Employees who read this sign and see that Braidwood is categorically forbidden to engage in ‘sex’ discrimination will assume (incorrectly) that Braidwood is legally required to recognize same-sex marriage, extend spousal employment benefits to same-sex couples, and allow its employees into restrooms reserved for the opposite biological sex,” says the complaint, indicating that Braidwood’s proprietor “is not willing to have Braidwood propagate this message without sufficient clarification.”

The sixth count summons the Administrative Procedure Act to attack the EEOC’s issuance of guidance on its website concerning its interpretation of Title VII, claiming that this constitutes a “rule” that is subject to judicial review under that statute.  The complaint asks the court to “hold unlawful and set aside” the EEOC’s regulatory guidance, invoking Section 706 of the APA.  Braidwood Management also claims to speak in this count as representative of all businesses in the U.S. that “object to the constitutional reasoning in Obergefell, excluding employers in states where same-sex marriage was legalized through legislation.”

The complaint lists as plaintiffs’ counsel Charles W. Fillmore and H. Dustin Fillmore of Fort Worth (local counsel in the district court) and Jonathan F. Mitchell of Austin.  The heavy gun here is Mitchell, a former Scalia clerk and Texas Solicitor General who has been nominated by President Trump to be Chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).  It seems ironic that Trump’s nominee is suing the federal government: the Justice Department and its head (in his official capacity) and the EEOC and its commissioners (in their official capacity), but despite naming the United States as a defendant, plaintiffs are not suing the president by name (in his official capacity, of course).

Federal Appeals Court Renders Decisive Win for Transgender Students in Pennsylvania

Posted on: July 1st, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

A unanimous three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued an extensive written opinion on June 18, explaining the decision it had announced on May 24 to reject a legal challenge by some students and parents to the Boyertown School District’s decision to let transgender students use facilities consistent with their gender identity.  The opinion, written by Circuit Judge Theodore McKee, is a total victory for the school district and its transgender students, upholding the trial court’s refusal to enjoin the District’s trans-friendly policies while the case is being litigated.  Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 16323, 2018 WL 3016864.

This lawsuit was originally filed in March 2017 by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Christian law firm that specializes in opposing policies protective of LGBT rights, representing some students at the Boyertown, Pennsylvania, schools, who objected to sharing facilities with transgender students. Some of the students’ parents or guardians are also plaintiffs in the case.  Citing an incident where one of the plaintiffs actually encountered a transgender student in a restroom, they claim that the District’s policy creates a “hostile environment” for the non-transgender students, violating their rights under Title IX, the Constitution, and the Pennsylvania common law right of privacy.

Title IX is a federal statute that provides that students at schools that receive federal financial assistance may not be deprived of equal educational opportunity on account of sex. In addition, the 14th Amendment has been interpreted to forbid sex discrimination by public institutions, as well as to protect the privacy rights of individual citizens from invasion by the government.  Pennsylvania’s common law recognizes a legal theory of unreasonable intrusion on the seclusion of another as a wrongful invasion of privacy.

The plaintiffs in this case argue that their equality and privacy rights were abridged by the School District’s policy allowing transgender students to use facilities consistent with their gender identity. The District undertook renovations of restroom and locker room facilities to increase individual privacy, and  has provided several single-user restrooms at the high school to accommodate any students who might feel uncomfortable using shared facilities to relieve themselves or change clothes.

U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith issued a ruling last August denying a preliminary injunction that the plaintiffs requested to block the school’s policy while the case was litigated. Judge Smith found that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim, and that granting the injunction would cause more harm to transgender students than any benefit to the plaintiffs.

McKee began his analysis by discussing the plaintiffs’ constitutional privacy claim. He acknowledged past cases holding that “a person has a constitutionally protected privacy interest in his or her partially clothed body,” but, he wrote, “the constitutional right to privacy is not absolute.  It must be weighed against important competing governmental interests.  Only unjustified invasions of privacy by the government are actionable.”  In this case, District Judge Smith had found that the Boyertown School District’s policy served “a compelling state interest in not discriminating against transgender students,” and that the policy was “narrowly tailored to that interest.”  The 3rd Circuit panel agreed with this conclusion.

The court found that “transgender students face extraordinary social, psychological, and medical risks and the School District clearly had a compelling state interest in shielding them from discrimination.” The court described expert testimony about the “substantial clinical distress” students could suffer as a result of gender dysphoria, which “is particularly high among children and may intensify during puberty.  The Supreme Court has regularly held that the state has a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors,” McKee continued.  “When transgender students face discrimination in schools, the risk to their wellbeing cannot be overstated – indeed, it can be life threatening.  This record clearly supports the District Court’s conclusion that the School District had a compelling state interest in protecting transgender students from discrimination.”

The court also observed that the challenged policy “fosters an environment of inclusivity, acceptance, and tolerance,” and specifically noted the amicus brief filed by the National Education Association, explaining how “these values serve an important educational function for both transgender and cisgender students.” Thus, the policy benefits not only transgender students but “it benefits all students by promoting acceptance.”

The court also pointed out that the District had gone out of its way to accommodate the privacy concerns of cisgender students by renovating the restrooms and locker rooms to enhance privacy and by making single-user restrooms available. “To the extent that the appellants’ claim for relief arises from the embarrassment and surprise they felt after seeing a transgender student in a particular space,” wrote McKee, “they are actually complaining about the implementation of the policy and the lack of pre-implementation communication.  That is an administrative issue, not a constitutional one.”

Thus, the court concluded, even if the policy is subject to “strict scrutiny” because it may involve a fundamental privacy right, it survives such scrutiny because of the compelling state interest involved and the way the District went about implementing it. The court observed that requiring the transgender students to use the single-sex facilities would not satisfy the state’s compelling interest, but would actually “significantly undermine it” since, as the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals stated last year in the case of transgender high school student Ash Whitaker, “a school district’s policy that required a transgender student to use single-user facilities ‘actually invited more scrutiny and attention from his peers.’”  McKee observed that “adopting the appellants’ position would very publicly brand all transgender students with a scarlet ‘T,’ and they should not have to endure that as a price of attending their public school.”

Furthermore, the court pointed out, the District’s policy “does not force any cisgender student to disrobe in the presence of any student – cisgender or transgender,” since the District has provided facilities “for any student who does not feel comfortable being in the confines of a communal restroom or locker room.” The renovation included “privacy stalls” and single-user facilities “so that any student who is uneasy undressing or using a restroom in the presence of others can take steps to avoid contact.”

But, said the court, it had never recognized an expansive constitutional right of privacy to the extent demanded by the plaintiffs in this case, and “no court has ever done so.” “School locker rooms and restrooms are spaces where it is not only common to encounter others in various stages of undress, it is expected.” Even the Supreme Court has commented that “public school locker rooms are not notable for the privacy they afford.”  So the court was unpersuaded that the plaintiffs’ demand in this case had any support in constitutional privacy law.

The 3rd Circuit panel also endorsed Judge Smith’s conclusion that there was no Title IX violation here.  As Smith found, “the School District’s policy treated all students equally and therefore did not discriminate on the basis of sex.”  Judge Smith had also found that the factual allegations did not rise to the level of a “hostile environment” claim, and the 3rd Circuit panel agreed with him.

Judge McKee pointed out that the Title IX regulations upon which plaintiff was relying do not mandate that schools provide “separate privacy facilities for the sexes,” but rather state permissively that providing separate facilities for male and female students will not be considered a violation of Title IX provided the facilities are equal. Furthermore, in order to find a hostile environment, the court would need evidence of “sexual harassment that is so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive and that ‘so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience that he or she is effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.’”  The plaintiffs’ allegations in this case came nowhere near meeting that standard.

Furthermore, the denial of equal access must be based on sex to violate Title IX. “The appellants have not provided any authority to suggest that a sex-neutral policy can give rise to a Title IX claim,” wrote Judge McKee.  “Instead, they simply hypothesize that ‘harassment’ that targets both sexes equally would violate Title IX; that is simply not the law.” He observed that the School District’s policy “allows all students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.  It does not discriminate based on sex, and therefore does not offend Title IX.”

The School District argued in response to the plaintiffs’ arguments that “barring transgender students from using privacy facilities that align with their gender identity would, itself, constitute discrimination under a sex-stereotyping theory in violation of Title IX.” This was the argument accepted by the 7th Circuit in Ash Whitaker’s lawsuit, and Gavin Grimm’s continuing lawsuit against the Gloucester County, Virginia, school district under Title IX, also advancing this theory, recently survived a motion to dismiss in the federal district court there.

But, wrote McKee, “We need not decide that very different issue here,” although he characterized the 7th Circuit’s decision in Whitaker’s case as “very persuasive” and said, “The analysis there supports the District Court’s conclusion that appellants were not likely to succeed on the merits of their Title IX claim.”

The court also agreed with Judge Smith’s conclusion that separate state tort law claims asserted by the plaintiffs were unlikely to be successful, having found that “the mere presence of a transgender individual in a bathroom or locker room is not the type of conduct that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” which is the standard for the tort of “intrusion upon seclusion” in Pennsylvania. The court also approved Smith’s finding that denying the preliminary injunction would not cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs, as the District has taken reasonable steps to protect their privacy.

Thus, the District’s trans-supportive policy will remain in effect while this case is litigated. The likely next step, if ADF does not slink away in defeat, would be to litigate motions for summary judgment if the parties agree that there is no need for a trial over disputed facts.  However, ADF is likely to sharply contest the facts, so it may be that an actual trial is needed to resolve this case.

Levin Legal Group of Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, represents the School District, and the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the ACLU’s national LGBT Rights Project, with volunteer attorneys from the law firm Cozen O’Connor, represent the Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, which intervened in the case to protect the interests of transgender students in the Boyertown District.

Third Circuit Rejects Challenge to Pennsylvania School District’s Policy Allowing Transgender Students to Use Facilities Consistent with Their Gender Identities

Posted on: May 26th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit took the unusual step on May 24 of announcing about an hour after hearing oral argument that it would unanimously affirm U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith’s ruling from last summer denying a motion for a preliminary injunction by a group of parents and students seeking to stop the Boyertown (Pennsylvania) Area School District from continuing to implement a policy allowing transgender students to use locker rooms and bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities. Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, 2018 WL 2355999 (3rd Cir., May 24, 2018), affirming 276 F. Supp. 2d 324 (E.D. Pa., August 25, 2017).

Later that day, the court issued a brief “Judgement” written by Circuit Judge Theodore A. McKee, so brief that it can be quoted in full here: “We agree Plaintiffs have not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits and that they have not established that they will be irreparably harmed if their Motion to Enjoin the Boyertown School District’s policy is denied. We therefore Affirm the District Court’s denial of a preliminary injunction substantially for the reasons that the Court explained in its exceptionally well-reasoned Opinion of August 25, 2017.  A formal Opinion will follow. The mandate shall issue forthwith.  The time for filing a petition for rehearing will run from the date that the Court’s formal opinion is entered on the docket.”  There was some suggestion in press reports that after hearing argument the court was concerned that the affirmance be effective immediately, since the school year would shortly end.

This is one of several similar cases filed around the country by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an organization formed to advance the freedom of Christians to assert the primacy of their beliefs over any conflicting obligations imposed by law. ADF is a staunch opponent of LGBT rights, battled on the ramparts to oppose marriage equality and to support the ability of businesses operated by Christians to refuse to sell their goods and services for same-sex weddings.  ADF has inserted itself into the “bathroom wars” by filing lawsuits on behalf of parents and allegedly cisgender students who oppose allowing transgender students to use single-sex facilities consistent with their gender identities.  When Judge Smith issued his decision last August, a federal magistrate judge in Illinois, Jeffrey T. Gilbert, had issued a report and recommendation to U.S. District Judge Jorge L. Alonso, which recommended denying ADF’s motion for a preliminary injunction against a similar school district policy in Students & Parents for Privacy v. United States Department of Education, 2016 WL 6134121 (N.D. Ill., Oct. 18, 2016), and Judge Smith cited and relied on Judge Gilbert’s analysis at various points in his decision.  Judge Alonso subsequently adopted Judge Gilbert’s Report and Recommendations, over the objections of ADF, on December 29, 2017, in Students & Parents for Privacy v. United States Department of Education, 2017 WL 6629520.

The plaintiffs in the Boyertown case argued three legal theories: first, that the district’s policy violates the constitutional privacy rights of non-transgender students under the 14th Amendment; second, that the school district’s policy violates Title IX’s requirement, as fleshed out in Education Department regulations, to provide separate restroom and locker room facilities for boys and girls; and third, that the policy violates Pennsylvania’s common law tort of invasion of privacy by intruding on the right of seclusion of non-transgender students.  Judge Smith found that the record compiled by the parties in response to the plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction showed that the plaintiffs were unlikely to prevail on any of these claims.  The bulk of his lengthy opinion (which runs 83 pages, including about six pages of headnotes, in Lexis) is devoted to a careful delineation of the factual record upon which he based his legal analysis.

Judge Smith explored each of the three theories at length, rejecting ADF’s argument that high school students have some sort of fundamental constitutional right not to share restroom facilities with transgender students because of the possibility that a transgender student would see them in their underwear, and noting particularly that factual allegations by individual plaintiff students who had found themselves in restrooms with transgender students showed that even if such a “right” existed, it had not been violated in any instance.

As to the Title IX argument, plaintiff insisted that allowing transgender students to use the restrooms created a “hostile environment” for the non-transgender students, but Judge Smith, recurring to Judge Gilbert’s ruling in the Illinois case, observed that “the School District treats both male and female students similarly,” undercutting the argument that the District is discrimination in education opportunity “because of” the sex of the individual plaintiff students.   “The practice applies to both the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms,” wrote Smith, “meaning that cisgender boys potentially may use the boys’ locker room and bathrooms with transgender boys and cisgender girls potentially may use the girls’ locker room and bathrooms with transgender girls.  In addition, with regard to the transgender students, both transgender boys and transgender girls are treated similarly insofar as they, upon receiving permission from the School District, may use the locker rooms and bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity.  Moreover, the School District is not discriminating against students regarding the use of alternative facilities if students are uncomfortable with the current practice insofar as those facilities are open to all students who may be uncomfortable using locker rooms or multi-user facilities… The School District’s similar treatment of all students I fatal to the plaintiffs’ Title IX claim.”  Concluding on the Title IX point, Judge Smith wrote, “The plaintiffs have failed to cite to any case holding that a plaintiff can maintain a sexual harassment hostile environment claim when the allegedly sexually harassing party treats all individuals similarly and there is, as such, no evidence of gender/sex animus.”  Simply put, the District was not “targeting” any student for particular adverse treatment because of his or her sex.  Judge Smith also pointed out that the law of “hostile environment” as it has been developed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to which courts refer in Title IX cases, sets a very high evidentiary bar for establishing a hostile environment, which he concluded could not be met by the plaintiffs’ factual allegations in this case.

As to the tort of invasion of privacy claim, Judge Smith noted that there were no allegations that any of the named defendants had personally invaded the privacy of any of the plaintiffs, as the plaintiffs’ factual allegations all related to two transgender students, identified as Student A and Student B, whose presence in locker rooms or restrooms was the subject of individual plaintiffs’ angst. But, of course, Students A and B were only present in those facilities because the District’s policy allowed them to be.  “The court does not deny that an individual seeks seclusion in a bathroom toilet stall from being viewed by other people outside of the stall,” wrote Judge Smith, pointing out that the cases cited by the plaintiffs in support of their common law privacy claims “involve alleged invasions of privacy in bathroom stalls,” usually involving police surveillance of public restrooms.  “Here,” Smith pointed out, “there are no allegations and the plaintiffs presented no evidence that any transgender student invaded their seclusion while they were in a bathroom stall.  And similarly, although the plaintiffs indicate that viewing a person while in a bathroom would be ‘considered “highly offensive” by any reasonable person,’ the case cited involved an intrusion into a single bathroom stall and not the presence of someone in the common area of a multi-user facility.”  After noting how the plaintiffs’ factual allegations about particular incidents involving transgender students in restrooms fell short of supporting the plaintiffs’ contentions about unwanted exposure of their bodies, Smith wrote, “the court does not find that a reasonable person would be offended by the presence of a transgender student in the bathroom or locker room with them, despite the possibility that the transgender student could possibly be in a state of undress more significant than Student A was in this case when the male plaintiffs same him.”  He concluded similarly regarding the other incidents described by the plaintiffs, and concluded they had not shown a likelihood that they would be able to establish liability under Pennsylvania’s invasion of privacy tort.

That could be the end of Smith’s analysis, since a finding that plaintiffs are likely to prevail would be necessary to ground a preliminary injunction against the District’s policy, but Smith, to be thorough, analyzed the irreparable harm factor that courts consider, concluding that because the District was providing single-user alternatives the individual plaintiffs would not be irreparable harmed if the policy was allowed to continue in effect. He concluded as well that because these two factors weighed against granting the injunction, there was no need to perform the “balance of harms” analysis that would necessarily follow if the plaintiffs had prevailed on the first two factors.

As noted above, the 3rd Circuit’s brief Judgement issued on May 24 described Judge Smith’s opinion as “exceptionally well-reasoned,” so it is likely that the “formal opinion” to follow will run along similar lines and probably quote liberally from Judge Smith.  Also, it would not be surprising were the court of appeals to give persuasive weight to decisions from other courts ruling on claims by transgender students to a right under Title IX and the 14th Amendment to use facilities consistent with their gender identity.  In the course of deciding those cases, the courts necessarily considered the same factual and legal issues presented by the Parents & Students cases.  In light of the judicial rulings so far in these “bathroom wars” cases, a consensus seems to have emerged in the federal judiciary that is part of a larger movement in the law in the direction of recognizing transgender civil rights claims under both the Equal Protection Clause in constitutional law and the statutory bans on discrimination because of sex.

In addition to ADF’s attorneys and the attorneys defending the school district, the court heard from ACLU attorneys representing the interests of transgender students in the Boyertown School District, including lead attorney Leslie Cooper with the ACLU LGBT Rights Project, lead attorney Mary Catherine Roper with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and cooperating attorneys from Cozen O’Connor, a Philadelphia law firm.

 

TWO MORE LGBTQ-RELATED CONTROVERSIES DROP OFF THE SUPREME COURT DOCKET

Posted on: January 10th, 2018 by Art Leonard 2 Comments

As the Supreme Court’s 2017-18 Term began in October, it looked like a banner term for LGBTQ-related cases at the nation’s highest court. Petitions were pending asking the Court to address a wide range of issues, including whether LGBTQ people are protected against discrimination under federal sex discrimination laws covering employment (from Georgia) and educational opportunity (from Wisconsin), whether LGBTQ people in Mississippi had standing to seek a federal order to prevent a viciously anti-gay religiously-motivated law from going into effect, and whether the Texas Supreme Court erred in holding that Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), did not necessarily require a municipal employer to treat same-sex married couples the same as different-sex married couples in their employee benefits plans.  The Court had already granted review in a “gay wedding cake” case from Colorado (Masterpiece Cakeshop, which was argued on December 5), and another petition involving a Washington State florist who refused to provide floral decorations for a same-sex wedding was waiting in the wings.

 

But the hopes for a blockbuster term have rapidly faded. In December, the Court declined to hear the employee benefits case and the Title VII employment discrimination case.  And now in January, the Court has declined to hear the Mississippi cases, Barber v. Bryant and Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant, and the Wisconsin case, Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District, has settled, with the school district agreeing to withdraw its Supreme Court petition.   It may be that the only LGBTQ-related issue that the Court decides this term is the one it heard argued in December: whether a business owner’s religious objections to same-sex marriage or his right to freedom of speech would privilege him to refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.  An opinion expected sometime in the coming months.

On January 8, the Supreme Court refused to review a ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barber v. Bryant, 860 F.3d 345 (5th Cir.), petition for rehearing en banc denied, 872 F.3d 671 (2017), which had dismissed a constitutional challenge to Mississippi’s infamous H.B. 1523, a law enacted in 2016 that protects people who discriminate against LGBTQ people because of their religious or moral convictions.  The 5th Circuit had ruled that none of the plaintiffs – either organizations or individuals – in two cases challenging the Mississippi law had “standing” to bring the lawsuits in federal court.

H.B. 1523, which was scheduled to go into effect on July 1, 2016, identifies three “religious beliefs or moral convictions” and protects against “discrimination” by the state anybody who acts in accord with those beliefs in a wide range of circumstances. The beliefs, as stated in the statute, are: “(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.”  Among other things, the law would protect government officials who rely on these beliefs to deny services to individuals, and would preempt the handful of local municipal laws in the state that ban discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity, so that victims of discrimination would have no local law remedy.  Mississippi does not have a state law banning sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, so H.B. 1523 in relation to private businesses and institutions was mainly symbolic when it came to activity taking place outside of the cities of Jackson, Hattiesburg and Oxford, or off the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi.

Two groups of plaintiffs brought constitutional challenges against the law in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, where the case came before Judge Carlton W. Reeves, the same judge who ruled for plaintiffs in a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage a few years earlier. He issued a preliminary injunction against implementation of H.B. 1523 on June 30, 2016, the day before it was to go into effect, finding that it would violate the 1st Amendment by establishing particular religious beliefs as part of the state’s law.  The plaintiffs also challenged it on Equal Protection grounds. Judge Reeves refused to stay his preliminary injunction, and so did the 5th Circuit.

The state appealed the grant of preliminary injunction to the 5th Circuit, where a unanimous three-judge panel ruled on June 22, 2017, that the district court did not have jurisdiction to issue the injunction because, according to the opinion by Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, none of the plaintiffs could show that they had suffered or were imminently likely to suffer a “concrete and particularized injury in fact,” which was necessary to confer the necessary “standing” to challenge the law in federal court.  In the absence of standing, he wrote, the preliminary injunction must be dissolved and the case dismissed.

The plaintiffs asked the full 5th Circuit to reconsider the ruling en banc, but the circuit judges voted 12-2 not to do so, announcing that result on September 29.  The dissenters, in an opinion by Judge James L. Dennis, bluntly stated that “the panel decision is wrong” and “misconstrues and misapplies the Establishment Clause precedent.”  Indeed, wrote Judge Dennis, “its analysis creates a conflict between our circuit and our sister circuits on the issue of Establishment Clause standing.”

Judge Dennis pressed home the point by citing numerous cases from other circuits which, he held, would support allowing the plaintiffs in this case to seek a preliminary injunction blocking the law from going into effect.  This gave hope to the plaintiffs that they might be able to get the Supreme Court to take the case and reverse the 5th Circuit, since one of the main criteria for the Supreme Court granting review is to resolve a split in authority between the circuit courts on important points of federal law.

However, on January 8 the Court denied the petitions the two plaintiff groups had filed, without any explanation or open dissent, leaving unresolved important questions about how and when people can mount a federal court challenge to a law of this sort. In the meantime, shortly after the 5th Circuit had denied reconsideration, H.B. 1523 went into effect on October 10.

A challenge to H.B. 1523 continues in the District Court before Judge Reeves, as new allegations by the plaintiffs require reconsideration of their standing and place in question, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s June 2017 ruling, Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075, whether the law imposes unconstitutional burdens on LGBTQ people seeking to exercise their fundamental constitutional rights.

Two days after the Court announced it would not review the 5th Circuit ruling, the parties in Whitaker, 858 F. 3d 1034 (7th Cir. 2017), involving the legal rights of transgender students under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, announced a settlement.  Under their agreement the school district will withdraw its cert petition.

The Supreme Court had been scheduled to hear a similar transgender student case last March, Gloucester County School Bd. v. G. G. ex rel. Grimm, but that case was dropped from the docket after the Trump Administration withdrew a Guidance on Title IX compliance that had been issued by the Obama Administration.  Since the 4th Circuit’s decision in Gavin Grimm’s case had been based on that Guidance rather than on a direct judicial interpretation of the statute, the Supreme Court vacated the 4th Circuit’s ruling and sent the case back to the 4th Circuit for reconsideration. See 137 S. Ct. 1239 (Mar. 6, 2017). That court, in turn, sent it back to the district court, which dismissed the case as moot since Grimm had graduated in the interim.

Ashton Whitaker is a transgender boy who graduated from Tremper High School in the Kenosha School District last June. His case would have given the Supreme Court a second chance to address the Title IX issue.  Whitaker transitioned while in high school and asked to be allowed to use the boys’ restroom facilities, but district officials told him that there was an unwritten policy restricting bathroom use based on biological sex.  He sued the district under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause.  U.S. District Judge Panela Pepper (E.D. Wisconsin) issued a preliminary injunction on Whitaker’s behalf in September 2016, and refused to stay it pending appeal.  See 2016 WL 5239829 (Sept. 22, 2016).

On May 30, 2017, the 7th Circuit upheld Judge Pepper’s ruling, finding that even though the Trump Administration had withdrawn the prior Title IX Guidance, both Title IX and the 14th Amendment require the school to recognize Whitaker as a boy and to allow him to use boys’ restroom facilities.  The school district petitioned the Supreme Court on August 25 to review the 7th Circuit’s decision, even though Whitaker had graduated in June.

In the meantime, Judge Pepper ordered the parties to mediation to attempt a settlement. Whitaker’s graduation in June undoubtedly contributed to the pressure to settle, and the parties asked the Supreme Court several times to extend the deadline for Whitaker to file a formal response to the petition as the negotiations continued.  According to press reports on January 10, the case settled for $800,000 and an agreement that the district would withdraw its petition.

The settlement and withdrawal of the petition leaves the 7th Circuit’s opinion standing as the first federal circuit court ruling to hold on the merits that Title IX and the 14th Amendment require public schools to respect the gender identity of their students and to allow students to use sex-designated facilities consistent with their gender identity.  However, lacking a Supreme Court ruling on the point this decision is only binding in the three states of the 7th Circuit: Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, the same three states bound by another 7th Circuit last year holding that employment discrimination because of sexual orientation violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

Pennsylvania District Judge Refuses to Dismiss Transgender Student’s Title IX and Equal Protection Claims

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

U.S. District Judge Robert D. Mariani denied a school district’s motion to dismiss Title IX and Equal Protection claims by a transgender elementary school student in A.H. v. Minersville Area School District, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 193622, 2017 WL 5632662 (M.D. Pa., Nov. 22, 2017).  The court rejected the school district’s argument that in light of the Trump Administration’s “withdrawal” of a Guidance issued by the Obama Administration on protection for transgender students under Title IX, the complaint failed to state a valid claim.

A.H., the eight-year-old plaintiff (whose suit was brought by “her next best friend and mother, Tracey Handling”), classified male at birth, “was diagnosed with gender dysphoria while in kindergarten,” wrote Judge Mariani, explaining, “Under the care of a pediatric psychologist, Plaintiff and her family have been exploring ways for Plaintiff to express her gender identity at home, in school, and in the community. . . Since beginning kindergarten in 2014, Plaintiff has continuously presented herself both in and out of school as a female.  Plaintiff uses a female name, dresses in clothing traditionally associated with females, is addressed using female pronouns, and is known to her classmates as a female student.”  Even though A.H.’s mother, supportive of her daughter’s needs, asked that she be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom in school, the School Superintendent, Carl McBreen, said they would not allow it in order to protect the privacy of other students.

This was not a problem during kindergarten, since the kindergarten classroom has a single-use bathroom used by all the students, and the only adverse problem during A.H.’s kindergarten year came during a field trip, when teachers required A.H. to wait until all the boys had used a male-designated bathroom and then allowed A.H. to use that bathroom. “The incident upset Plaintiff and resulted in some of her classmates asking her why she, as a girl, was using the boys’ bathroom.”  A.H.’s mother questioned the principal about this.  His response was that it was “school policy that a child must use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex listed on the child’s birth certificate,” and talked about “protecting” the other students from A.H.  However, despite repeated requests, the school never showed A.H.’s mother an actual written policy.  Her request to allow A.H. to use girls’ bathrooms during A.H.’s first grade year was turned down, with Superintendent McBreen stating that “Minersville isn’t ready for this.”  While giving a school tour to Mrs. Handling, the principal referred to A.H. using male pronouns, even after she corrected him.

After the Obama Administration Guidance was distributed to all public school districts, Superintendent Breen informed Mrs. Handling that her daughter could use the girls’ restrooms at school, but the school “has not created any policy on bathroom access for transgender students.” A.H. filed suit seeking a court order to comply with Title IX and Equal Protection requirements.

In its motion to dismiss the Title IX claim, the school first argued that the Trump Administration’s withdrawal of the Obama Administration Guidance left “no legal basis to support a Title IX claim against the school district for transgender discrimination.” After concisely relating the sequence of events surrounding the Obama Administration Guidance and the Trump Administration withdrawal, Judge Mariani, quoting from Evancho v. Pine-Richland School District, 237 F. Supp. 3d 267 (W.D. Pa. 2017), noted that “The 2017 [Trump Administration] Guidance ‘did not propound any “new” or different interpretation of Title IX or [DOE’s restroom regulation], nor did the 2017 Guidance affirmatively contradict the 2015 and 2016 Guidance documents.”  Indeed, the Evancho court had observed, the 2017 Guidance “appears to have generated an interpretive vacuum pending further consideration by those federal agencies of the legal issues involved in such matters.”

“Thus,” wrote Judge Mariani, “the fact that the Department of Justice and the Department of Education withdrew their interpretation of Title IX does not necessarily mean that a school, consistent with Title IX, may prohibit transgender students from accessing the bathrooms that are consistent with their gender identity. Instead, it simply means that the 2016 Guidance cannot form the basis of a Title IX claim.”  Lacking a binding precedent on this issue from the U.S. Supreme Court or the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals (which has jurisdiction over federal courts in Pennsylvania), Judge Mariani looked to the 7th Circuit’s decision in Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District, 858 F.3d 1034 (7th Cir. 2017), as well as the earlier decision from the Western District of Pennsylvania court in Evancho.  He observed that Title IX courts have looked to precedents under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act for guidance in determining the scope of protection under law banning discrimination because of sex, and that both the 7th Circuit and the Evancho court, following such precedents, had concluded, in the words of the 7th Circuit, that “a policy that requires an individual to use a bathroom that does not conform with his or her gender identity punishes that individual for his or her gender non-conformance, which in turn violates Title IX.”  The 7th Circuit specifically rejected the argument that providing access to a gender-neutral single user restroom is “sufficient to relieve the School District from liability, as it is the policy itself which violates the Act.”  Similarly, the Evancho court, while noting that the law on this issue was currently “clouded with uncertainty,” determined that the transgender student plaintiffs in that case had “made a more than sufficient ‘showing’ in their Complaint of a right to relief under” Title IX.

Mariani pointed out that the Minersville school district had not attempted in its motion to distinguish these precedents or “present any arguments as to why this Court should not follow their holdings. The Court, further, sees no reason why the analysis and holdings of either Evancho or Whitaker are unsound when applied to the facts of this case.”  Mariani concluded, “Contrary to Defendant’s argument, a specific practice need not be identified as unlawful by the government before a plaintiff may bring a claim under Title IX . . .  Further, while the Court recognizes that the Amended Complaint seems to indicate that Plaintiff now has access to the girl’s bathroom at school and thus may not have alleged any continuing violation of Title IX, that does not undercut the fact that Plaintiff has adequately pleaded that a violation of Title IX occurred as some point in time.”  The judge also rejected the school’s argument that it did not, as a matter of law, have any “discriminatory intent” when it acted.  First, he pointed out, discriminatory intent was not a prerequisite to getting injunctive relief, just damages.  And, in any case, statements attributed to school officials could provide a basis for finding discriminatory intent.

Turning to the Equal Protection claim under the 14th Amendment, Judge Mariani found agreement of the parties that heightened scrutiny would apply to judicial review of the school’s alleged policy and its actions.  As to that standard, which requires the defendant to show that the challenged policy serve an important government objective, Judge Mariani found an absence of proof by the school district.  “Here,” he wrote, “Defendant does not advance any important objective that its bathroom policy served.  Instead, Defendant reiterates its argument that, in the absence of guidance from the government, Defendant made all reasonable efforts to accommodate Plaintiff,” but this argument fails.  “Plaintiff has adequately alleged the existence of a school policy that treated her differently on the basis of her transgender status or nonconformity to gender stereotypes.  As such, she has sufficiently stated a claim for relief under the Equal Protection Clause.”  As constitutional discrimination claims require a showing of discriminatory intent, the judge pointed to statements by school officials that adequately serve at this stage of the case as evidence of discriminatory intent.  Judge Mariani noted the similar rulings in Whitaker and Evancho, while also noting a contrary ruling from several years ago by a different district judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania, Johnston v. University of Pittsburgh, 97 F. Supp. 3d 657 (W.D. Pa. 2015), which for some reason the school district never even cited in support of its motion – perhaps because that opinion is somewhat of an embarrassment.

Judge Mariani was appointed to the court by President Barack Obama in 2011.

A.H. and her mother are represented by David L. Deratzian of Hahalis & Kounoupis PC in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Two Federal Judges Order Public Schools to Let Transgender Students Use Gender-Appropriate Restrooms

Posted on: September 27th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

Within days of each other, two federal district judges have issued preliminary injunctions requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms consistent with the students’ gender identity. U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio, based in Cincinnati, issued his order on September 26 against the Highland Local School District on behalf of a “Jane Doe” 11-year-old elementary school student, in Board of Education v. U.S. Department of Education, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 131474, 2016 WL 5239829.   U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper of the Milwaukee-based Eastern District of Wisconsin, issued her order on September 22 against the Kenosha Unified School District on behalf of Ashton Whitaker, a high school student, in Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District No. 1, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 129678, 2016 WL 5372349.  Jane Doe is a transgender girl, Ashton Whitaker a transgender boy.

Although both cases are important, producing essentially the same results under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, Judge Marbley’s ruling is more significant because the judge sharply questioned the jurisdictional basis for a nationwide injunction issued on August 21 by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas, Wichita Falls, which ordered the Obama Administration to refrain from initiating investigations or enforcement of violations of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 based on gender identity discrimination.  O’Connor was ruling in a case initiated by Texas in alliance with many other states challenging the validity of the Obama Administration’s “rule” that Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funds, prohibits gender identity discrimination and requires schools to allow transgender students to use facilities consistent with their gender identity.

Neither the Highland nor Kenosha cases were affected by O’Connor’s order in any event, since these cases were already under way before O’Connor issued his order and they involved district court complaints filed by the individual plaintiffs, not by the Department of Education.

The Doe v. Highland case before Judge Marbley is in part a clone of the Texas case pending before O’Connor. When a dispute arose about the school’s refusal to allow a transgender girl to use the girls’ restrooms and the Department of Education became involved in response to a complaint by the girl’s parents, the school district, abetted by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the “Christian” law firm that is also providing representation to other challengers of the Administration’s position, rushed into federal district court to sue the Department of Education and seek injunctive relief.

As the case progressed, Jane Doe’s parents moved on her behalf to intervene as third-party plaintiffs against the school district. ADF pulled in many of the states that are co-plaintiffs in the Texas case and a clone case brought in federal district court in Nebraska, and moved to make them amicus parties in this case.  At the same time, pro bono attorneys from Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, a large firm based in Washington, D.C., together with local counsel from Columbus, Ohio, organized an amicus brief by school administrators from about twenty states in support of Jane Doe.  After being allowed to intervene as a plaintiff, Doe moved for a preliminary injunction to require the Highland Schools to treat her as a girl and allow her to use appropriate restrooms.

Judge Marbley first confronted the federal government’s argument that the court did not have jurisdiction over the Highland school district’s attack on the Administration’s interpretation of Title IX. Unlike Judge O’Connor in Texas, Judge Marbley concluded that the government was correct.  If a school district wants to attack the government’s interpretation of Title IX, he found, it must do so in the context of appealing an adverse decision by the Department of Education ordering it to comply with the interpretation or risk losing federal funding.  Marbley pointed out that under the administrative process for enforcement of Title IX, no school would lose funding before a final ruling on the merits is rendered, a process that would involve administrative appeals within the Department followed by an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals with a potential for Supreme Court review of a final ruling by the court.  Thus, the school district had no due process argument that it stood to lose funding without being able to seek judicial relief if it were deprived of the ability to sue directly in the district court.  Marbley found that there was no authorization under the statute or the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) for a school district to file a lawsuit directly in federal district court challenging an interpretation of Title IX.

Part of ADF’s argument in its lawsuits challenging the Obama Administration’s guidance to the school districts is that by not embodying this interpretation in a formal regulation, the Administration had improperly evaded judicial review, since the APA authorizes challenges to new regulations to be filed promptly in federal courts of appeals after final publication of the regulation in the Federal Register. ADF argued that the Guidance was, in effect, a regulation masquerading as a mere “interpretation.”  Judge O’Connor bought the argument, but Judge Marbley did not.

Marbley was dismissive of Judge O’Connor’s determination that he had jurisdiction to hear the Texas case. “The Texas court’s analysis can charitably be described as cursory,” he wrote, “as there is undoubtedly a profound difference between a discrimination victim’s right to sue in federal district court under Title IX and a school district’s right to challenge an agency interpretation in federal district court.  This Court cannot assume that the first right implies the second.”  Marbley went on to discuss in detail Supreme Court rulings on the question whether there was a private right of action under various federal statutes that did not expressly authorize lawsuits in the district courts, and the circumstances under which such authorization can be found by implication, as the courts have done to allow students to file Title IX lawsuits.  Marbley rejected the Highland school district’s argument that once Jane Doe had intervened, she would provide a basis for the court to assert jurisdiction over the school district’s claim.  Actually, he pointed out, the school district could raise its arguments against the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX in response to Jane Doe’s lawsuit, and need not maintain a lawsuit of its own.  Thus, he concluded, the school district’s complaint should be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.

In both cases, the attorneys for the transgender students argued alternatively under Title IX and under the Equal Protection Clause. In both cases, they argued that because gender identity discrimination is a form of sex discrimination, the Equal Protection analysis should receive the same “heightened scrutiny” that courts apply to sex discrimination claims, which throws the burden on the government to show that it has an exceedingly important interest that is substantially advanced by the challenged policy.

Here the cases diverged slightly in the judges’ legal analysis. Both judges found that the transgender plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claims under both Title IX and the Equal Protection clause, that they were suffering harm as a result of the challenged policies, and that any harm the school districts would suffer by issuance of preliminary injunctions was outweighed by the plaintiffs’ harm if injunctions were denied.  In addition, both judges found that the injunctions were in the public interest.  But Judge Marbley additionally found that heightened scrutiny applied, while Judge Pepper, more conservatively, reached her conclusion by applying the rational basis test.  In either case, however, the judges found that the school districts’ justifications for their exclusionary policies lacked sufficient merit to forestall preliminary relief against them.

Significantly, Judge Marbley’s conclusion that heightened scrutiny applied to this case drew support from the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges.  He used Obergefell to question the continuing relevance of prior court of appeals analyses of equal protection “in light of Obergefell’s emphasis on the immutability of sexual orientation and the long history of anti-gay discrimination. Like the district courts that examined suspect classification based on sexual orientation,” he continued, “this Court will proceed to conduct its own analysis of the four-factor test to determine whether heightened scrutiny applies to a transgender plaintiff’s claim under the Equal Protection Clause.”  Marbley based his analysis of the four-factor test on a district court ruling last year in New York, Adkins v. City of New York, which found all factors to be satisfied to justify heightened scrutiny, including a finding that “transgender people have ‘immutable and distinguishing characteristics that define them as a distinct group” for purposes of analyzing their equal protection claims.

Significantly, both judges accorded great weight to the Obama Administration’s Guidance, and both judges also found persuasive the Richmond-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in the Gavin Grimm case that district courts should defer to the Administration’s interpretation due to the ambiguity of existing regulations about how to deal with transgender students under Title IX.  In light of such ambiguity, the federal administrators would enjoy deference so long as they adopted an interpretation of the statute and regulations that is not inconsistent with the purpose of the statute.  The judges rejected the argument that because Congress in 1972 did not intend to ban gender identity discrimination, administrators and judges decades later could not adopt such an interpretation of “discrimination because of sex.”

Although the Supreme Court has stayed the injunction issued by the district court in the Gavin Grimm case while the Gloucester (Virginia) school district’s petition for review of the 4th Circuit’s ruling is pending before the Supreme Court, Judge Marbley pointed out that the stay does not affect the status of the 4th Circuit’s decision as a persuasive precedent.  He also pointed out the unusual step taken by the Justice Stephen Breyer of writing that he had agreed to provide the necessary fifth vote for a stay to “preserve the status quo” as a “courtesy” to the four conservative justices.  The Highland school district argued that the stay “telegraphed” that the Supreme Court was going to grant review of the 4th Circuit’s decision, but, wrote Marbley, “even if Highland has somehow been able to divine what the Supreme Court has ‘telegraphed’ by staying the mandate in that case, this Court unfortunately lacks such powers of divination.”  Furthermore, he wrote, “This Court follows statements of law from the Supreme Court, not whispers on the pond.”

Judge Marbley also accorded great weight to the amicus brief filed on behalf of school administrators from around the country. In this brief, they explained how they had implemented the policies required by the Education Department to accommodate transgender students.  They pointed out that allowing transgender students to use appropriate facilities had not created any real problems.  They argued that this was a necessary step for the mental and physical health of transgender students, and did not really impair the privacy of other students.  Furthermore, in the more than twenty school districts joining in this brief, the new policy had not in any case led to an incident of a sexual predator gaining access to a restroom under the pretext of the policy and harming any student.  Thus, while acknowledging that school districts can be legitimately concerned about the health and safety of students, the courts could conclude that any such risk was conjectural and not borne out by experience.

The judges also noted other district court decisions over the past year ordering schools to allow transgender students to use appropriate facilities, including a recent ruling in one of the North Carolina cases, requiring the University of North Carolina to ignore H.B.2, that state’s infamous “bathroom bill,” and allow the three individual transgender plaintiffs to use appropriate restrooms at the university while the case is pending before the court.

Judge Marbley’s in-depth analysis of the jurisdictional issues provides a roadmap for a challenge before the Houston-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to Judge O’Connor’s nationwide injunction.  The Texas lawsuit attempted to short-circuit the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act by dragging an interpretive dispute into the federal district court when the relevant statute provides an administrative forum for hearing and deciding such issues before appealing them to the Courts of Appeals.

Judge Marbley was appointed to the district court by President Bill Clinton. Judge Pepper was appointed by President Barack Obama.

Maine High Court Says Transgender Girl Can Use Public School Restroom of her Choice

Posted on: January 30th, 2014 by Art Leonard No Comments

Maine’s highest court ruled on January 30 that a transgender girl attending Maine public schools is entitled to use the girl’s restroom. Voting 6-1, the court reversed a contrary ruling by the Penobscott County Superior Court. The dissenting judge agreed that the right of transgender students to use the restroom of their choice should be protected, but argued that the legislature needed to amend the state’s public restroom statute to reach that result. Justice Warren M. Silver wrote the opinion for the court.

The court allowed the plaintiffs to use pseudonyms to protect confidentiality, so the plaintiffs were identified as John and Jane Doe, parents of Susan Doe. Susan, born male, began to identify as female as early as age two. She began attending school at the Asa Adams School in Orono, and generally wore gender-neutral clothing until third grade, when, as the court describes it, “her identity as a girl became manifest” and, for the first time, the school’s principal became aware that Doe was transgender. Students in the early grades used single stall restrooms, and Susan was allowed to use the single-stall girl’s room without incident. In third grade, teachers and other students referred to Susan as she and used her preferred name, and by fourth grade, she was dressing and appearing exclusively as a girl.

During Susan’s fourth-grade year, the school implemented a formal plan to “address Susan’s gender identity issues and her upcoming transition to fifth grade, where students used communal bathrooms separated by sex.” By this time, Susan had received a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria. “School officials recognized that it was important to Susan’s psychological health that she live socially as a female,” wrote Justice Silver. And school officials did not interpret the state’s restroom facilities law as prohibiting somebody in Susan’s position from using the girls’ bathroom. A team was convened, including Susan’s mother, her teachers, a guidance counselor and the school district’s director of special services to deal with how the school would treat Susan. They agreed she would be treated as a girl and could use the communal girls’ restroom. They agreed that requiring her to use the boys’ room was not acceptable. Indeed, the principal testified in this lawsuit that it would not have been safe for her to do so. There was a unisex staff restroom on the school premises, which the team saw as available in case Susan’s use of the girl’s restroom became “an issue.”

In the fifth grade, it became “an issue,” because the grandfather of a male student, who was the student’s guardian, instructed him that if Susan was free to use the girls’ restroom, than so was he. This student followed Susan into the girls’ restroom on two occasions, and “the controversy generated significant media coverage.” Schools tend to react to controversy by wimping out, which is what the school did in this case, directing Susan that she had to use the single-stall, unisex staff restroom. Susan was the only student directed to use that room.

The special team met again to discuss Susan’s transition to middle school, and school officials insisted that Susan would not be permitted to use the girl’s restroom in middle school. Her parents objected to this, and at the end of her sixth grade year, they moved to another part of the state to transfer her to another school.

But even before the move, they filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission against the school district, represented by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the Boston-based New England LGBT rights law firm. Maine’s Human Rights Law specifically bans discrimination in public accommodations because of sexual orientation, and the term sexual orientation as used in the statute is defined to include gender identity. For the first time, the school district argued in response that the state statute requiring schools to provide separate restrooms for male and female students supported its position, and the Superior Court granted summary judgment to the school district on that basis.

Rejecting that interpretation, Justice Silver wrote that the “sanitary facilities” provision was intended “to establish cleanliness and maintenance requirements for school bathrooms, as well as requirements for the physical layout of toilet facilities. It does not purport to establish guidelines for the use of school bathrooms. Nor does it address how schools should monitor which students use which bathroom, and it certainly offers no guidance concerning how gender identity relates to the use of sex-separated facilities.” On the other hand, the human rights act was intended to “prohibit discrimination against transgender students in schools.” Justice Silver rejected the school district’s argument that the sanitary facilities provision “preemptively created an exception” to the human rights law requirements. Instead, he insisted that “a consistent reading of the two statutes avoids conflicting, illogical results and comports with the legislative intent by giving effect to both provisions.”

In this case, said the court, school administrators had accepted at an early stage that Susan was a girl and would be treated as a girl, and the school had itself determined that she could use the girls’ room. The later decision to limit her to the staff room was not due to any change in her status, but “on others’ complaints about the school’s well-considered decision,” and this was discriminatory. The court said that the school’s discrimination could not be “excused” by “compliance” with the sanitary facilities law.

The court pointed out that it was not holding that “any person could demand access to any school facility or program based solely on a self-declaration of gender identity or confusion without the plans developed in cooperation with the school and the accepted and respected diagnosis that are presented in this case.” Thus, the court rejected the dissent’s argument that its interpretation of the statutes would require schools “to permit students casual access to any bathroom of their choice.”

Dissenting Justice Andrew M. Mead insisted that he supported the right of a transgender student to be free from discrimination at school because of gender identity, but he could not agree with the majority’s interpretation of the sanitary facilities statute. “The statutory directive to segregate bathrooms in schools by sex, and providing for separate entrances and exits for those bathrooms, clearly anticipates that the use of a bathroom would be restricted to the sex for which it has been designated,” he insisted, disagreeing with the court’s statement that the schools had the prerogative to create their own policies concerning how the bathrooms were to be used. He found the “plain language” of the two statutes to be in conflict, and said that the court should have abstained from resolving the conflict, deferring the issue to the legislature.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Leigh I. Saufley agreed with the court’s result, but strongly supported Justice Mead’s call for the legislature to address the issue. “Put simply,” wrote Saufley, “it could now be argued that it would be illegal discrimination for a restaurant, for example, to prohibit a man from using the women’s communal bathroom, and vice versa. I agree with the dissent that it is highly unlikely that the Legislature actually intended that result. Accordingly, on this matter of public policy, it would benefit the public for the Legislature to act quickly to address the concern raised by the dissent in this matter.”

Jennifer Levi, a law professor who works with GLAD on gender identity cases, argued the appeal on behalf of the Does.