9th Circuit Court Affirms Right of Transgender Students to Use School Bathrooms, Locker Rooms, and Showers that Match their Gender Identity

United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed a district court’s dismissal, allowing “transgender students to use school bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers that match their gender identity rather than the biological sex they were assigned at birth.”

A “student who had been born and who remained biologically female publicly identified as a boy, and asked school officials to allow him to use the boys’ bathroom and locker room.” The school “acknowledged the student as a “transgender male” and permitted him to use the boys’ locker room and bathroom facilities with his peers.”

The Ninth Circuit’s decision holds “that there is no Fourteenth Amendment fundamental privacy right to avoid all risk of intimate exposure to or by a transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth.” Additionally, the court says “it did not violate Title IX”; “just because Title IX authorizes sex-segregated facilities does not mean that they are required, let alone that they must be segregated based only on biological sex and cannot accommodate gender identity.”