In August, two federal courts of appeal held that school boards that adopted policies barring transgender (or gender-affirmed) students from using the restrooms that matched their gender identity violated both the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination. See Adams v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida, 2020 WL 456181 (11th Cir. Aug. 7, 2020), at http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201813592.pdf; Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, 2020 WL 5034430 (4th Cir. Aug. 26, 2020), at https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/191952.P.pdf. These decisions add to the near unanimous string of recent decisions reaching the same result.

Both courts provide a rich history of the discrimination and hostility that students such as Drew Adams and Gavin Grimm have confronted simply for trying to live their lives in accordance with their gender identity, which is considered the most important of the elements (e.g., chromosomes, gonads, and hormones) that determine a person’s sex. Both courts also debunked the various rationales each school district used to justify their policies.The Fourth Circuit closed its opinion by observing: