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Caitlyn Hope Grimm

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 13, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Legal advocacy groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court this week in a case expected to determine whether sexual discrimination laws governing education can be applied to so-called “gender identity.” 

Liberty Counsel, Family Research Council (FRC) and The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (Becket Fund) filed amicus curia briefs in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. in support of the Virginia school board’s authority to maintain bathrooms and other intimate facilities for its students based upon biological sex.

The groups cited student safety and privacy, religious liberty and overreach by the federal government in their arguments.

“Liberty Counsel stands with the Gloucester School Board as its responsibility is to protect the safety of students from harmful situations,” Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said in a statement. “It is absurd that the Supreme Court has to address whether a girl with gender dysphoria should be treated as a boy.”

“The federal law does not allow persons to subjectively think, and therefore be treated, as the opposite of their biological sex,” Staver continued. “It is very obvious how the Supreme Court should rule in this case.”

Caitlyn Hope Grimm, now 17 and a high school senior identifying as a boy, first began using the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School in 2014 during her sophomore year after she legally changed her name to Gavin.

After some parents complained, the school board adopted a policy requiring students to use either the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender or private, single-stall restrooms specifically installed in response by the school.

Despite the availability of private facilities, Grimm sued the school district in June 2015 for access to the boys’ room, alleging violation of the 1972 Title IX federal barring sexual discrimination.

Obama’s U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights changed how it interpreted gender identity in April 2014, making it a protected class under federal law.

The Obama administration has made it a priority to push gender identity in U.S. schools, threatening loss of taxpayer funds if schools don’t comply with regulations recognizing “gender fluidity.”

It remains to be seen how such issues and cases will play out in a Trump administration with a presumed more Constitutionalist balance on the Supreme Court.

Less than a month after Grimm and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued, Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) inserted itself in the case by filing a “statement of interest” in support of the gender-confused girl’s quest for access to the boys’ bathroom.

A federal judge first ruled in September of that year that Grimm could not use the male’s facilities. The decision was overturned in April 2016 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, and the school district vowed to appeal.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) had also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in September 2016 on behalf of 8,914 concerned parents, students, grandparents, and community members, along with more than 40 state family policy councils, all of whom support the Gloucester County School District’s policy supporting students’ privacy.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in October 2016, having issued a decision in August allowing the school district to maintain its student privacy policy until the case is decided.

The brief from the Becket Fund was filed in conjunction with the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The church is concerned as the operator of the largest Protestant educational system in the world that its mission would threatened if the Supreme Court did not respect the church’s religious liberty in its ruling.

According to the brief, this was namely its ability to be obedient to the Bible and God’s commands and “recognize that an important part of a person’s identity is authored by God through that person’s birth sex.”

Family Research Council’s (FRC) amicus brief was filed jointly with the North Carolina Values Coalition (NCVC).

It argues that education policy should be decided at the local level, that the July 2015 DOE letter and appellate court ruling threaten the liberty of all students by invading their privacy, and that the DOE letter makes law when that should be left to the legislature.

“Young children in public schools all over our land are some of society's most vulnerable members, especially as they leave their families day to day to enter an environment in which they are supposed to be cared for and watched over,” FRC attorney Travis Weber said in a statement. “Local communities like Gloucester County should be left alone to set their own policies and not suffer federal interference on such an issue.”

Weber pointed to studies finding that between 80 percent to 95 percent of the pre-pubertal children who suffer from gender dysphoria will cease having the disorder in adolescence.

“However,” Weber continued, “according to the Obama administration's Department of Education and Department of Justice — and this is the issue in this case — children should be forced to sacrifice their expectations of privacy at the behest of one Washington bureaucrat directing who they shall be made to use the shower, locker room or bathroom with. This is unconscionable.”

The federal court of appeals ruling lacks legal authority and clearly goes against the clear meaning of “sex” when that law was adopted decades ago,” Liberty Counsel contends.

“Advancements in biotechnology have demonstrated what society has intuitively understood for millennia, i.e., that human beings are conceived as either male or female and there is no scientific basis for a claim that individuals have a separate ‘gender identity’ that can differ from their biological sex,” its brief states.

“The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights ignored this inconvenient truth when they announced that the term “sex” in Title IX now includes ‘gender identity’ so that sex-separate private facilities must be turned into unisex social laboratories,” it continues. “This Court should reject the Departments’ attempt to infuse Title IX with a sociopolitical agenda wholly lacking in evidentiary foundation.”