South Carolina asks Supreme Court to allow anti-transgender school bathroom policy
The emergency appeal is the latest in a series of cases involving transgender issues to come before the high court.
South Carolina is asking the Supreme Court to allow the state to enforce its policy barring transgender students in state-funded schools from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
In an emergency appeal filed Thursday, the state asked the justices to lift a lower-court injunction that blocked the state from enforcing the bathroom-related budget proviso, which took effect in July 2024. Under the proviso, the state Department of Education is required to withhold 25 percent of state school funding from districts violating the policy.
The bathroom policy “is designed to protect the privacy and safety of all students in a space that has historically been recognized as intimate and vulnerable,” the state wrote in its appeal.
The appeal stems from a challenge brought by a teenage transgender boy whose middle school in the Berkeley County School District suspended him for using boys’ restrooms. His lawyers argue the proviso violates Title IX, the federal education law that bars sex-based discrimination.
“South Carolina wants the Supreme Court to take the extraordinary remedy of intervening in an ongoing lower court appeal — all because the state wants to stop one ninth grader from using boys’ restrooms while that appeal proceeds,” said Alexandra Brodsky, litigation director for Public Justice’s Student’s Civil Rights Project, which is representing the student.
“This case does not present the sort of emergency that would justify such intervention,” Brodsky said.
The South Carolina policy applies in all K-12 public or charter schools in the state.
About 19 states have similar restrictions barring transgender people from using facilities that align with their gender identity in either government-owned spaces, schools or colleges.
The Trump administration has also said Title IX will now only be interpreted based on biological sex. The administration has sought to exclude transgender students from sports teams and single-sex facilities that align with their gender identity.
South Carolina’s appeal plunges the Supreme Court once again into the contested culture-war debate over the rights of transgender people. In June, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. And the justices have a pair of cases on their docket for next term about state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban people assigned male at birth from competing on school teams for women and girls.
The question of transgender students using school bathrooms previously came to the Supreme Court in in 2017 and 2021, but the justices declined to dig into the issue.
That case was brought by Gavin Grimm, a transgender man, who sued his county school board in Virginia in 2015 over its policy that barred him from using the boys’ restroom and forced him to use a single-stall facility.
The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th Circuit sided with Grimm twice, ruling the transgender bathroom ban was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The Supreme Court decided to not hear the case, leaving the appeals court’s decision in place.
The injunction issued by the 4th Circuit earlier this month on South Carolina’s policy hinged on that court’s earlier ruling in Grimm’s case. South Carolina Solicitor General Thomas Hydrick told the Supreme Court that the Grimm ruling is a “discredited outlier.”
Hydrick argued that the high court’s June ruling on gender-affirming care in Tennessee gives states wide latitude to adopt policies to discourage young people from identifying as transgender, including through bathroom restrictions.