Chicago-area parents and students are asking a federal judge for an injunction stalling the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom directive as school reconvenes from summer break.
Attorneys for Students and Parents for Privacy, which represents 51 families in Township High School District 211, argued Monday that harm from the directive to students would be irreparable.
The lawsuit claims several female students are afraid “that a biological boy will walk in at any time while they use the locker rooms and showers and see them in a state of undress or naked.”
John Knight, director of the LGBT and HIV Project at the ACLU of Illinois, which represents a transgender student in the lawsuit, said the families “failed to explain or demonstrate any harm to female students sharing the locker room” with a biological male.
He also scolded attorneys for the plaintiffs for refusing to recognize his client as a girl.
“Their confusion and insensitivity was demonstrated anew by the lawyer’s decision to mis-gender our client and to assert that transgender people are delusional while intersex persons are ’imperfections of nature,’” Mr. Knight said in a statement.
District 211 students returning from summer vacation are currently allowed to use the restrooms and locker rooms of the gender with which they identify. School went back into session on Monday.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Gilbert, who will give his recommendation to U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso, said from the onset of the four-hour hearing that he would not make a decision on the injunction immediately. The timetable for the decision is not clear.
Jocelyn Floyd, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, which represents the families, said Mr. Gilbert asked difficult questions of both sides at the hearing.
“He gave some pretty hard-hitting questions to both sides, which is a very good sign of a judge that’s taking things seriously,” Ms. Floyd said. “He’s not just taking either side at face value, he’s making sure he understands the implications of what will happen down the road with whichever ruling he comes down with.”
Following a 2013 complaint from a transgender student, identified in court records as “Student A,” federal authorities last year said District 211’s locker room policy was in violation of Title IX, the federal ban on sex discrimination in education.
District 211 initially tried to settle the complaint by allowing transgender students to use the locker room of their choice and installing privacy curtains for them to change behind.
But the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said that wasn’t enough.
“Those female students wishing to protect their own private bodies from exposure to being observed in a state of undress by other girls in the locker rooms, including transgender girls, could change behind a privacy curtain,” said the Office for Civil Rights investigation into the complaint.
The agency gave District 211 30 days to resolve the issue or risk losing $6 million in federal education funding.
The Office for Civil Rights report was followed by a directive issued by the Obama administration in May compelling public schools nationwide to permit access to intimate facilities on the basis of gender identity.
Parents and Students for Privacy filed a lawsuit that month against District 211, the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, challenging the constitutionality of the transgender bathroom directive. The families argue it tramples on the privacy rights of other students and misinterprets Title IX, which specifically allows schools to segregate bathrooms based on biological sex.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois intervened in the case on behalf of a Student A.
• Bradford Richardson can be reached at brichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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