Page:Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida (2021).pdf/34

 upon their wives”).

The Supreme Court in acknowledged that statistics and numbers have surface appeal. But the Court also knew it was “unrealistic to expect either members of the judiciary or state officials to be well versed in the rigors of experimental or statistical technique.” 429 U.S. at 204, 97 S. Ct. at 460. The easy manipulation of statistics by parties, and the possibility of being fooled by them, “illustrate[] that proving broad sociological propositions by statistics is a dubious business, and one that inevitably is in tension with the normative philosophy that underlies the Equal Protection Clause.”

We view the dissent’s reliance on a figure of 99.96 percent as a prime example of the folly of relying on statistics in equal protection analysis. Dissenting Op. at,. The relevant inquiry in this case is not what percentage of St. Johns students are transgender, but whether the challenged policy furthers the important goal of student privacy. And on that point, the dissent offers no statistics. Nor could it. When it comes to actual reported invasions of privacy