Page:Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida (2020).pdf/33

 comes as no surprise that the Supreme Court has “looked to its Title VII interpretations of discrimination in illuminating Title IX” and its anti-discrimination provisions. , 527 U.S. 581, 616 n.1, 119 S. Ct. 2176, 2195 n.1 (1999) (Thomas, J., dissenting);, , 503 U.S. 60, 75, 112 S. Ct. 1028, 1037 (1992) (applying, in the context of a Title IX claim, Title VII’s conception of sexual harassment as sex discrimination).

The School Board argues that Title IX does not proscribe discrimination against transgender people, because the statute was only “intended to address discrimination plaguing biological women.” Appellant’s Br. at 39. However, teaches that, even if Congress never contemplated that Title VII could forbid discrimination against transgender people, the “starkly broad terms” of the statute require nothing less. 140 S. Ct. at 1753. This reasoning applies with the same force to Title IX’s equally broad prohibition on sex discrimination.

Still, the School Board argues that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination is somehow different from Title VII’s because “schools are a wildly different environment than the workplace” and education “is the province of local governmental officials.” Appellant’s Br. at 43–44. We are not persuaded. Congress saw fit to outlaw sex discrimination in federally funded schools, just as it