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The Bathroom Bill Era is Over
The bathroom bill movement spawned in 2015 is officially dead after the Supreme Court declined to take up Gavin Grimm’s lawsuit earlier this week
When he was 15 years old, Gavin Grimm asked to use the boy’s room at his school after coming out as transgender. At first, the school allowed it, but not long after the school board for Gloucester County school district in Virginia reversed course, responding to public outcry.
The school adopted a policy applying to boys and girls “with gender issues” that essentially treated trans adolescents like Grimm as a third, deviant gender category. Grimm was forced to use bathroom facilities that no other student at the school was required to use, often forcing him to miss extended periods of class time not missed by his cisgender schoolmates.
So Grimm, along with his attorneys at the ACLU, filed suit in 2016. Four years later the 4th District US Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, the third federal circuit to rule in favor of trans school bathroom access. Earlier this week, the US Supreme Court refused to take up the case, meaning the 4th Circuit ruling stands and is now a key legal precedent in the states represented on the circuit: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina.
