The Supreme Court has officially decided against hearing a challenge to a Virginia appeals court decision that allows students in school to use restrooms according to the gender they identify as rather than the biological sex they were born as.
The challenge is a response to a case that was initially brought forward by Gavin Grimm, a teenager who was born biologically female, but now identifies as male. Grimm went on to say that the Gloucester County, Virginia school system was being discriminatory in its bathroom policy because it forced students to use the bathroom of their biological gender.
Grimm actually won the case last year.
The Supreme Court shot down the whole challenge with an unsigned order stating they would not hear the case, despite both Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito stating they would have heard the case.
The rejection of the challenge means that the decision in Grimm’s case will continue to hold up unchanged.
Grimm’s case was one of several legal battles involving transgender bathroom use that played out at about the same time that the Supreme Court was weighing whether or not to legalize gay marriage. In this one, the school was initially lenient but soon changed its policy, claiming that bathroom use was “limited to the corresponding biological genders.”
When lawyers for the school appealed to the Supreme Court last year, Grimm’s attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union responded by urging the court not to take the case, arguing that it was a Title IX violation to deny any student the bathroom use of his or her choice.
The appeals court decision favoring Grimm came down shortly after the Supreme Court decided another case involving gay and transgender discrimination, Bostock v. Clayton County. In that case, the court found that discriminating against gay and transgender employees is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The real question this poses concerns the justices that former President Donald Trump put on the bench during his term. It was believed these folks would be a legitimate conservative majority, but thus far, that seems very suspect.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see whether these folks live up to the hype or not.s
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