‘Simply Common Sense': A Federal Ruling On Transgender Bathrooms Could Also Apply To Women's Sports, Legal Experts Say

Posted By TheNewsCommenter: From Dailycaller.com: “‘Simply Common Sense’: A Federal Ruling On Transgender Bathrooms Could Also Apply To Women’s Sports, Legal Experts Say”. Below is an excerpt from the article.

A ruling by a federal appeals court that upheld a Florida school district’s policy of separating restrooms by “biological sex” could be used to bar men from joining women’s sports teams, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In a 7-4 decision on Dec. 30, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a prior ruling by a district judge and ruled that a Florida school board’s policy that required students to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex was constitutional and did not violate Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. The reasoning of the ruling will be applied to prohibit biological men from competing in women’s sports, legal experts told the DCNF. (RELATED: After Resisting Policy Change, Florida School District Now Bans Boys From Using Girls’ Bathrooms)

“Judge [Barbara] Lagoa, who was the author of the opinion, actually went to the sort of unusual step of also penning her own concurring opinion,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a think tank focused on creating and pushing policies that focus on individual freedom, told the DCNF. “[She] actually indicated in her concurrence that one of the policy concerns that was underlying all of this was women’s athletics. In other words, this particular outcome, if they had determined that a transgender individual could have access to a bathroom that was in alignment with their gender identity and not their biology, would have what she called ‘consequences beyond the bathroom door’ and chief among those for her point of view, and rightly so, were athletics.”

The decision by the appeals court came after former St. Johns County student Drew Adams, a transgender student who identifies as a boy, sued the school district for their policy of separating restrooms by “biological sex” instead of gender identity. Adams argued that transgender individuals should not be forced to use gender-neutral bathrooms or bathrooms that do not align with their gender identity.

In her concurring opinion of the ruling, Lagoa focused on the issue of having sports participation determined on the basis of gender identity rather than biological sex. Lagoa wrote that Title IX is rightly interpreted as protecting biological sex, not gender identity, but under the precedent that the act prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity, women’s sports teams could see male members.

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