DAYTON, Ohio – A federal judge on Monday upheld the Bethel Local School District’s decision to let transgender students use communal restrooms consistent with their gender identity, dismissing a challenge from a group of parents and students who objected on religious grounds.
“Not every contentious debate, concerning matters of public importance, presents a cognizable federal lawsuit,” said the decision from U.S. District Court Judge Michael J. Newman. “Although the parties, undoubtedly, seek to vindicate what they believe is truth, the allegations in the complaint do not pass legal muster under the applicable methods of constitutional, statutory, or precedential interpretation.”
The case arose after a middle schooler who identified as transgender transferred to the school in 2020. The child said using the single occupancy bathroom in the nurse’s office “was difficult because it was frequently occupied whenever she needed to use it, and she felt ostracized, humiliated, and targeted by other students who taunted her for using the separate bathroom,” causing her to avoid using the restroom at school.
She was allowed to start using the communal girls’ restroom in January 2022, in compliance with the school’s anti-harassment policy. School board members said their legal counsel told them that multiple federal courts determined “Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 requires that transgender students be granted access to the restrooms and locker rooms of their sexual identification.”
Parents who objected to the decision filed multiple lawsuits, including a federal case that claimed the school district violated the state’s open meetings law when it made the decision. Their federal complaint said Title IX does not require the school to implement the new bathroom policy, and that the policy violated the rights of other students.
“The Plaintiffs have long enjoyed the settled expectation that Bethel would provide restrooms and other intimate facilities shared only by persons of the same biological sex,” said the federal complaint filed by a group of unnamed parents. “This expectation is important to the Plaintiffs for a variety of reasons including safety, privacy, modesty, religion, and historical views of sex.”
Several of the plaintiffs, who identified as Muslim, stated that being forced “to use intimate facilities with members of the opposite biological sex is like forcing them to eat pork. The families do not understand why the school respects their beliefs less than the beliefs of the LGBTQ+ community.”
They said they’d donated their own resources to build a sex-neutral restroom, next to the other restrooms in school, for the use of transgender students. Their complaint said the school took the donors’ resources and built the restroom, but “continued in its present course, without telling the donors.”
Christian and Muslim plaintiffs claimed their children were now “deeply uncomfortable” using the school restrooms in the wake of the policy change and trying to wait until they get home from school to relieve themselves.
“It is an affront to his modesty and dignity to have to look over his shoulder in an intimate facility with anxiety that he will be exposed to a member of the opposite biological sex,” the complaint said of one Christian boy.
Newman’s decision said he was dismissing their’ federal claims “because they either fail to allege a cognizable case or controversy or, assuming the allegations are true, fail to satisfy the requisite legal standards,” and suggested they continue to seek redress in state courts.
“Although parents have the right to make decisions about where to send their children to school, they do not have a constitutional right to revoke a school’s policy on student bathroom usage,” the decision said.
The decision also disputed the claim that the plaintiffs are being discriminated against because their “religious beliefs requiring transgender-free bathrooms are not honored.
It said that the school district’s policy is “neutral and generally applicable,” because it “restricts religious and nonreligious conduct equally—every student gets to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity.
“Nothing about the School District’s decision to allow Anne to use the girls’ bathroom denies the Student Plaintiffs access to the school communal bathrooms, or any other public benefit afforded to every student under the School District’s anti-discrimination policy,” the decision continues. “Given this, it is unclear how Plaintiffs have been ‘personally subject[ed] to discriminatory treatment.’”
Cleveland.com has sought a response to the decision from an attorney for the plaintiffs. A statement from the school district said the decision made it clear the school board acted to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex, and that the district did not violate any rights owed to disagreeing students and their parents, including their right to freely exercise their religion.
“The landmark decision makes clear the school district acted neutrally towards all students, wanting to follow the law, to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex, protecting the rights of its transgender students, when it comes to making all campus restrooms accessible to all students in conformity with the student’s gender identity,” said the statement from the board of education’s legal counsel, Lynnette Dinkler.
A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which intervened in the case on the transgender student’s behalf, said the ruling “reaffirms that the Constitution is not a vehicle to compel discrimination.
“Nothing in the constitutional guarantees of parenting rights, equal protection, or free exercise of religion mandates that transgender students be excluded from gender-appropriate communal restrooms on the basis of their classmates’ beliefs and values,” said a statement from David Carey, the group’s deputy legal director. “For public schools to function, one student’s or family’s religious beliefs cannot provide a basis to exclude another student from full participation in the school environment.”
In May, a contingent of Ohio House Republicans signed on to a bill that would block transgender students from using school bathrooms or locker rooms that align with their assumed gender identity. The bill was referred to committee but has not yet had a hearing.