RICHMOND, va. — The fate of North Carolina’s new law aimed at restricting restroom use by transgender people could be determined in Virginia, where a school board has ordered a teenager to stay out of the boys’ room.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond could rule any day now in the case of Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male. Grimm says he takes a “walk of shame” to the restroom at Gloucester High School.
Whatever the judges decide, the impact will be more sweeping than what Grimm envisioned when he challenged the policy last year.
“I did not set out to make waves,” Grimm said. “I set out to use the bathroom.”
North Carolina’s bathroom bill was unveiled, debated and signed into law in a single day last week, two months after the appeals court in Richmond heard arguments in Grimm’s case. Two workers and a transgender student at the University of North Carolina are making similar arguments as they seek a federal injunction preventing enforcement of the law.
Among other things, the law directs public schools, public universities and government agencies to designate bathrooms and locker rooms for use based on people’s biological sex, and says transgender people can only use bathrooms matching their gender identity if they’ve had their birth certificates changed, which in North Carolina usually requires sexual reassignment surgery.
The law has prompted a national backlash. Businesses and politicians have announced boycotts of North Carolina, and legal challenges ensure that the wedge issue will dominate the Republican governor’s re-election campaign against his Democratic challenger.
Advocates on all sides will closely read the ruling. U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder in Winston-Salem, N.C., an appointee of President George W. Bush’s, will have to adhere to any precedents set by the appellate court, said Joshua Block, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing Grimm.
“One way or another, what happens in Gavin’s case is likely going to set the rules of the road for how the North Carolina case proceeds,” Block said.
Grimm says school board policy requiring him to use girls’ restrooms or a single-occupancy unisex bathroom violates Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in public schools. He also says the policy denies him equal protection rights under the Constitution.
