Page:Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida (2022).pdf/108

 opinion. The majority opinion vacates Adams II, rejects Adams I, vacates the district court’s judgment, and reverses the district court on Adams’s equal protection and Title IX claims.

Following a bench trial, we review a district court’s findings of fact for clear error and its conclusions of law de novo. See Compulife Software Inc. v. Newman, 959 F.3d 1288, 1301 (11th Cir. 2020). A factual finding is clearly erroneous only if in examining the record and commensurate finding we are “left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made.” In re Stanford, 17 F.4th 116, 121 (11th Cir. 2021) (internal quotation marks omitted). “If the district court’s account of the evidence is plausible in light of the record viewed in its entirety, the court of appeals may not reverse it even though convinced that had it been sitting as the trier of fact, it would have weighed the evidence differently.” Wallace v. NCL (Bahamas) Ltd., 733 F.3d 1093, 1100 (11th Cir. 2013) (internal quotation marks omitted).

My analysis proceeds in four parts. First, I clarify the question before the Court and highlight an error permeating the majority opinion—its counterfactual use of the term “biological sex.” Second, I address Adams’s equal protection claim. Third, I discuss Adams’s Title IX claim. Fourth, I explain why the School District’s slippery slope arguments and concerns about the lack of a limiting principle are unfounded.