(ETH) – An Appeals court in Virginia has once again ruled that a school district in the state discriminated against a female student who reportedly identifies as a male by declining to allow her to use the boys’ restroom.
Judge Henry Floyd who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama recently wrote “We hold that the board’s restroom policy constitutes sex-based discrimination and, independently, that transgender persons constitute a quasi-suspect class,”
He went further and said: “No one questions that students have a privacy interest in their body when they go to the bathroom,” but the school district “ignores the reality of how a transgender child uses the bathroom: ‘by entering a stall and closing the door.’”
Further, those with gender identity issues do not present a “peeping tom” threat as they will “mind their business like any other student.” “Put another way, the record demonstrates that bodily privacy of cisgender boys using the boys restrooms did not increase when Grimm was banned from those restrooms,” Floyd said.
“Therefore, the board’s policy was not substantially related to its purported goal.” The judge also stressed that in his ruling that “Just like being cisgender, being transgender is natural and is not a choice.” Floyd further asserted that transgenderism is “not a psychiatric condition,”
but simultaneously stated that those who struggle with their gender “are up to three times more likely to report or be diagnosed with a mental health disorder as the general population” and noted that “gender dysphoria is defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”
