Page:Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida (2022).pdf/149

 Third, recall that Adams’s entire lawsuit depends upon the existence of sex-separated bathrooms. Adams sought only to be treated like any other boy. He asked for, and the district court awarded, an injunction that prevented the School District from barring Adams from the boys’ bathroom, not from having sex-separated bathrooms. The majority opinion employs stereotypic ideas and assumptions in an attempt to persuade readers that admitting transgender students into the bathrooms corresponding with their consistent, persistent, and insistent biological gender identity will result in the elimination of sex-separated bathroom facilities. This is simply not so. As to equal protection claims by transgender students, the facts unique to each case will determine whether a school district has met its burden under heightened scrutiny. And with respect to Title IX claims, the fact that sex is a but-for cause of differential treatment does not necessarily mean that actionable discrimination exists. Our law, both constitutional law and statutes and regulations, recognizes a legitimate, protectible privacy interest in the practice of separating bathroom facilities by sex. But that interest is not absolute: it must coexist alongside fundamental principles of equality. Where exclusion implies inferiority, as it does here, principles of equality prevail.

Adams’s case tells the story of a hauntingly familiar harm. By forcing Adams to use the gender-neutral restrooms, the School Board required Adams to undergo “humiliating” public “walk[s] of shame” in front of his peers and others at school to use a separate