2y ago

The Supreme Court declines to step into the fight over bathrooms for transgender students

The Supreme Court on Tuesday passed up a chance to intervene in the debate over bathrooms for transgender students, rejecting an appeal from an Indiana public school district.

Federal appeals courts are divided over whether school policies enforcing restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use violate federal law or the Constitution.

In the case the court rejected without comment, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom. The appeal came from the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southwest of Indianapolis.

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Why would anyone care where people go the bathroom? Where do you think transsexuals have been going all these years? What nonsense.
- Hey! I appreciate your support, trans rights are human rights!
  In the future, could you please use transgender instead of transexual? The latter is a really dated term and ties a gender and societal issue to sexuality. While they may be closely associated, they're not the same thing and any little bit helps break that association.
  
  I've proven I can't remember this kind of stuff, but I'll try.
  
  Seconded, transgender is more accurate and how we describe ourselves.
  
  I think this is goofy. More than half my life I've heard the word transexual and I certainly don't think it's offensive.
  
  Yeah a transexual sounds more like someone who is sexually attracted to transgender people.
- They have a whole ~~fantasy~~ conspiracy they've cooked up where we're sneaking in to women's restrooms to do human trafficking and dark web revenge porn and shit.
  
  And that's the typical projection of the conservatives who revealed that they would do that if they had the ability.
  
  If a trans man sneaks into the boys room, everybody in the room spontaneously turns gay.
  If a trans woman sneaks into the girls room, it’s a lesbian orgy.
  I don’t make the facts.
  
  I think a bigger concern are regular men using this as an excuse to creep on women in bathrooms.
  At least that's what I hear women saying. They're afraid of men using their restrooms.
- They don’t think we’ve been around for years.
  
  I'm reading this super awesome book called "before we were trans" That kind of goes over the history of gender non-conformity and transgender identities. It's fucking amazing
- They don't believe transexuals exist.
- I don't have anything to back it up but I think it's a large group's correlation between trans/gay == pedophilia. When I was a kid, my mom(southern baptist republican) didn't differentiate between gay people and illegal sexual activity like molestation(this was in the 80s). If my mom had been told that a guy that viewed himself as a girl wanted to use the girl's restroom, she would have immediately decided it was because he wanted to do something terrible to the girls.
  I think the main reason for that is because her God told her gay people were going to hell.. It made it easy for her to view them as evil.
- Worse: they are expending huge amounts of tax dollars over the right to act in a discriminatory way.
- Yeah, fuck your genitals, show me how big your dookies are! Who's gonna help me start a petition to build a national weekly poopie scoreboard? USA! USA! USA! USA!
  
  Username checks out...
- It's frustrating to hear comments about "trans people" or "gay people" or whatever other identifier they choose, the conversation is never about treating them like people. The way they speak would make more sense if they were talking about a stray dog than an actual feeling, thinking person.
  Trans folk are the newest "others," though it seems that others basket is getting quite full lately.
  Anytime someone in power says anything about needing to protect you from others, they are purposely sowing discord. It is the speaker that is trying to direct your anger away from them and unto the others.
  Everyone is capable of being awesome and assholes. No identifying characteristic makes one anymore likely to be an asshole.
- Women don't like going to the bathroom with men.
  They tolerate it on campgrounds, but not places of business that they frequent often.
  
  You keep saying this, but you don't speak for all women. I am a woman who does not care one flying fuck if the other ladies in the restroom were born with a penis, a vagina, or some variation thereof. I care much more about whether they flush & wipe the seat.
  I'm certain you're not conflating trans with violent, right?? Or sticking up for people who do?
  
  I'm a woman and I don't care. I've been in the bathroom with men before and even had a nice conversation with them. Do I not exist? Who gave you the rights to speak on behalf of all women everywhere?
  
  It's not like we watch each other pee? It's not the men's room.
- I'm 100% a supporter of trans right to use the bathroom of their gender.
  There is a reason that bathrooms are separated by gender.
  So if you can't understand why people who don't believe trans people exist are upset that people are using the wrong restroom, you're just like the people who can't understand that trans people exist: it's a lack of being able to see beyond your own self and understand the position of others. While I strongly disagree with them, their position is not very complicated and easy to understand.
  
  I dont think there's any need to give the benefit of the doubt to these people anymore. You might argue they believe LGBTQ people shouldn't exist, and I might believe you, but I tend to think their main motivation is just stirring up anger and resentment against the "other side".
  If people were concerned about privacy or safety, the us would have single user bathrooms or at least stalls that didn't have 1in gaps around the doors (my 90s high school didn't have stall doors at all, and in some bathrooms didn't even have stalls, just a toilet next to the sink in the locker room). The same people aren't upset about those things, because they don't actually care about any of this.
  
  There is a reason that bathrooms are separated by gender.
  And that is?
In the case the court rejected without comment, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom.
So, meanwhile, transgender individuals win. At least that's something. 👍🏻
With any luck, this will hold untill the rest of the nation follows suit.
- Only in those circuits where the court has allowed students to use the bathroom of choice. There are several circuits that voted to deny this. Your rights now depend on where you live in the country until either the SCOTUS one days takes it up or some sort of Title IX changes force it.
  
  With this court the country might be better off without them weighing in. Those fucks are likely to make it so the whole country has even more hostile laws.
Wouldn't want to reveal any bigotry during an election year.
- Have you ever seen an election year?
  Revealing the bigotry is basically the point. Trump talked about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country and it made him more popular.
  
  If he gets even more than 74 million votes this year, I'm going to shit a whole pallet of bricks
- Pretty sure they don’t give a shit about revealing bigotry when ever they feel like it. In fact it’s a feature for the right
I wish there were more non-gendered restrooms.
The one's I've been to usually has shared sinks and has stalls that fully enclosed, as in you can't look under the stall. Most restrooms in the US, you can see under the stall in front and from an adjacent stall.
And the urinals is usually in a separate area of the restrooms.
- This, these are the best bathrooms anyways. I'd rather not listen to someone on the phone with someone else while using the restroom, lol. Animals, man.
- I think the reason we don't have separate toilet rooms is because people would use them to shoot up and businesses don't want that.
- Problem is women don't want to go to the bathroom with men.
  
  My highschool did gender neutral restrooms well over a decade ago, and had been doing it for years. (Mostly, it was an old building, and there weren't enough restrooms to make them all gendered and separate). Everyone had their own enclosed bathroom, with real walls and real doors. It worked fine. Better than fine, as the students were tasked with cleaning the entire school, so nobody tried to destroy the restrooms as some other group of students would have to clean it up. New students got used to it in about 15 minutes, and it wasn't a topic of discussion throughout HS. This was well before the culture wars though.
  
  If you've ever been at a sports stadium when the women's line is incredibly long and the men's line is short, you'll find plenty of women who miraculously discover a love of gender neutrality.
  The fear that most people have - and I've seen this as common among women as men, particularly when you invoke Gay Panic - is of sexual assault. And in a country, like the US, which seems to be either unwilling or unable to discourage sexual assault via public policy, there's a real anxiety for lots of people whenever they use any kind of public restroom.
  There was a very similar outcry back during the 60s, when Jim Crow was struck down and bathrooms were racially integrated. You had certain people show extreme distress at the prospect of sharing a lavatory with some of a different race. And, as a consequence, we got a lot of suburban white flight and de facto segregation through modern day red-lining and private security harassment. There was a whole thing during the 80s, where black people trying to use restrooms in private malls (particularly in the South) would be harassed, expelled, and even arrested under nakedly untrue claims of shoplifting. Bunch of News Hour TV shows made a big stink about it for a long time.
  But the idea that "women just don't want to" is heavily overstated. A lot of this anxiety is manufactured. A lot more has far less to do with gender generally speaking and more to do with the individual's personal experiences.
  
  When you ban trans women from women's bathrooms you're opening them to trans men and all a cis man has to do is say "no worries, I'm a trans man, don't mind the beard."
  You make it EASIER for men to infiltrate women's bathrooms.
If the lower courts are divided, isn't it the job of the Supreme Court to make it clear?
- They kinda have made it clear though. By rejecting the appeal, they're saying that the 7th Circuit Court's decision stands.
  
  Except the ~~Fourth~~ Eleventh Circuit went the other direction with an almost identical Florida school policy, so the question of "Is it ok under the US Constitution for schools to force transgender students to use a particular bathroom?" has a different answer depending on where you live, which is the exact kind of thing the Supreme Court is supposed to deal with.
  e; Whoops, had the wrong court and wrong case. That's been updated now, but for the record here's the older case I had been linking to
  https://www.courthousenews.com/11th-circuit-rules-florida-schools-transgender-bathroom-policy-unconstitutional/
  
  Except that they aren't overriding the other courts, so really they are saying that it's up to every circuit to set their own standard.
- Typically, yes. Now, not so much.
  They're saving all their energy for the upcoming craziness if/when Trump is elected President while in prison.
  
  "Legal precedent would make it almost impossible for us to avoid standing up for a transgender person if we took this case and we couldn't possibly have that."
Of course it's southern indiana. 100‰ regressive region bordering 100% regressive states.
I hate my state.
upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom.
Why is it only focusing on 1 gender?
- Probably because the lawsuit was filed on behalf of a transgender boy.
  The case originally required John R. Wooden Middle School in Martinsville to allow a seventh-grader identified only as A.C. to have access to the restroom while litigation continued.
Always think its odd they want someone like this or this in the women's washroom...
- Ultimately, what it boils down to is that they want to force trans people to de-transition, go back into the closet, and hopefully kill themselves. The pain and aggravation caused by these stupid bathroom laws is quite literally the point.
  
  The cruelty is the point… They don’t want us to exist
  It’s really fucking stressful being under a bathroom law. There aren’t correct choices. It’s supposed to be either committing a misdemeanor or getting the shit kicked out of you.
  
  It's like killing yourself because in physics they teach v=s/t instead of v=ds/dt. Cruelty. Clearly, v=s/t doesn't work.
  I really don't get it. If you have a penis you would like to use a urinal. If you don't you wouldn't.
  
  That's a slippery slope.
  Most of the women I see who have an opinion on this are afraid of men sharing their bathrooms. They have a legitimate fear of men that borders on and often crosses over into sexism.
I wonder why the Pope told them to take a pass for now.

120 comments