WASHINGTON, D.C., May 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — By declining to hear a Pennsylvania case called Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday allowed school districts to continue letting students to use locker rooms and facilities designated for the opposite sex.
During the 2016–2017 school year, the Boyertown Area School District secretly implemented a policy allowing boys to use girls’ locker rooms and vice versa. Neither parents nor students were notified about this. Some male students learned of the policy only when a girl was changing clothes alongside them in a locker room. School officials told them they should “make it as natural as possible”; one male student left the school entirely as a result.
Another Boyertown student, Alexis Lightcap, learned of the policy when she encountered a boy in her restroom. She was shocked and afraid and fled the restroom, but school officials refused to listen to her privacy concerns, either.
“Students struggling with their beliefs about gender need compassionate support, but sound reasons based on common sense have always existed for schools to separate male and female teenagers in showers, restrooms, and locker rooms,” said Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) senior counsel and vice president of appellate advocacy John Bursch. “No student’s recognized right to bodily privacy should be made contingent on what other students believe about their own gender. Because the 3rd Circuit’s decision made a mess of bodily privacy and Title IX principles, we believe the Supreme Court should have reviewed it. But we hope the court will take up a similar case in the future to bring much needed clarity to how the lower courts should handle violations of well-established student privacy rights.”
“These types of school policies have serious privacy implications. That’s why we hope the Supreme Court will eventually weigh in to protect students’ constitutional right to bodily privacy,” said ADF legal counsel Christiana Holcomb. “All schools, including Boyertown Area School District, should be providing compassionate support for those dealing with gender dysphoria, but they should do so in ways that protect the privacy of all students.”
Ria Tabacco Mar of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the Supreme Court’s declining to hear the case “an enormous victory for transgender students.”
“Funny how bodily privacy is all the rage with so-called progressives when it comes to the violence of abortion, yet students privacy is a non-issue when it comes to ‘transgender’ special rights,” the Radiance Foundation posted on its Facebook page.