The Gloucester County School Board's Anti-Transgender Jihad Continues

With the Covid-19 pandemic still disrupting public education and a host of things for school boards to be focused upon, one would think that the Gloucester County, Virginia School Board would have better things to do than continue a legal vendetta with a transgender student after numerous court losses, including two at the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Such an assumption would be mistaken, however, and the Gloucester County School Board remains obsessed with pandering to the religious fanatics and right wing crackpots in the county - Gloucester County voted 66.67% for Donald Trump - and squandering school division time and resources. Hence the School Board's latest appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking yet again to find legal backing for abusing and shaming transgender students.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the School Boards latest transphobic effort.  Here are highlights:

The Gloucester County School Board in Virginia is once again asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case involving restroom access for transgender students.

The school board Friday petitioned the high court to take up the case; the justices’ decision on whether to do so likely won’t come for weeks or months.

The petition comes in the case of Gavin Grimm, a trans youth who attended high school in Gloucester County and has now graduated. He sued the school district in 2015 after being denied access to the boys’ restrooms, even though he had used them without incident for two months. He was instead required to use an inconvenient single-stall restroom, which he avoided to the detriment of his health.

Grimm lost at the trial court level but won at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which ruled in 2016 that the district had violated his rights under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — a federal law banning sex discrimination in education — and the guidelines that President Barack Obama’s administration released on its application, advising schools to let trans students use the restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.

The district appealed to the Supreme Court then, and the justices accepted the case but changed their minds in 2017, after Donald Trump’s administration revoked the Obama-era guidelines. They sent it back to the lower courts for reconsideration, and Grimm won at both the trial and appeals court levels, with the Fourth Circuit ruling last August that the school district’s policy violated both Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

“It is disappointing that after six years of litigation, the Gloucester County School Board is still digging in its heels,” said Josh Block, senior staff attorney for the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project. “Federal law is clear: Transgender students are protected from discrimination. Gloucester County schools are no exception.”

“No student deserves the kind of treatment Gavin endured while he was in high school,” added Eden Heilman, legal director for the ACLU of Virginia. “Courts have ruled time and again that transgender students must be protected from discrimination, yet Gloucester County schools continue to deny basic respect and dignity for its students.

Other than some nice waterfront properties and a few notable historic buildings, Gloucester County has little to recommend it in my view.