Page:Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida (2018).pdf/41

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Case 3:17-cv-00739-TJC-JBT Document 192 Filed 07/26/18 Page 41 of 70 PageID 10719

restroom (as Adams would when using the boys’ restroom).

Nor was there any evidence that transgender students might expose themselves to other students in the restroom; in fact, the evidence was to the contrary–transgender students want to be discrete about their anatomy so other students do not recognize them as anything but the gender with which they identify. Indeed, as the School Board admitted, there could be transgender students whose enrollment documents are consistent with the students’ gender identity, and no one would know they are using restrooms that are different from the ones that match their sex assigned at birth.

Based on the evidence at trial, the Court concludes that the School District’s bathroom policy “does nothing to protect the privacy rights of each individual student vis-a-vis students who share similar anatomy and it ignores the practical reality of how [Adams], as a transgender boy, uses the bathroom: by entering a stall and closing the door.” Whitaker, 858 F.3d at 1052; see also Boyertown, 893 F.3d at 193 (rejecting cisgender students’ argument that transgender students in school locker rooms and multi-stall restrooms violated their constitutional right to privacy, noting “appellants are claiming a very broad right of personal privacy in a space that is, by definition and common usage, just not that private”). Thus, when the School District’s stated privacy interest is “weighed against the facts of the case and not just examined in the abstract,” Whitaker, 858 F.3d at 1052, it fails to provide an “exceedingly

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