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The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case challenging a Tipp City school district’s bathroom policy that allows students to use the restroom that matches their gender identity.
Parents and students are suing Bethel Local School District for allowing a transgender girl to use the girls restroom and want the school district to ban this policy.
“The families do not understand why the school respects their beliefs less than the beliefs of the LGBTQ+ community,” according to court documents.
Ohio’s ACLU chapter joined the lawsuit in January 2023 to intervene on behalf of a transgender student and oppose the parents and students who filed the lawsuit. The case involves a transgender female who was 14 at the time and a student at Bethel High School.
Doe v. Bethel was filed in federal court in November 2022, but a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio dismissed the case in August 2023. The plaintiffs immediately appealed the case to the Sixth Circuit.
In court on Tuesday, former Ohio Solicitor General Ben Flowers argued the school district favored secular beliefs over religious exercise.
“Specifically, it treated the burdens associated with lack of access to communal restrooms as worth addressing if those burdens are experienced as a result of secular beliefs about gender, but not if they arise from sincere religious convictions,” he argued for the plaintiffs.
Even though all students have the ability to access the high school’s single-use bathrooms, Flowers said that’s not practical.
“The challenged policy accommodates religious objectors by offering them the same accommodation with the same hardships that was previously deemed intolerable as applied to transgender students,” he said. “(Religious students) have access to the same to the single user restrooms, but the limited number of those and large size of the religious communities, means that students end up holding their urine, refusing to use the bathroom, and suffering the educational benefits.”
Before getting to high school, the transgender student used Bethel Middle School’s single-use restrooms, according to court documents.
“Even though I initially asked for permission to use the single-occupancy restrooms, being limited to these few restrooms quickly became a problem,” according to court documents.
It caused the student to be late to class and called attention to her being transgender. The student and her mother reached out to the school district to let them know she would start using the girls’ restroom and the district allowed her to start using the girl’s restroom in January 2022.
“I felt safe and comfortable using the girls’ communal restroom,” according to court documents. “I would not feel safe using the boys’ communal restroom because I am not a boy and I have experienced very serious and scary bullying and harassment.”
Taylor Knight, speaking on behalf of Bethel Schools, said the issue is not transgender students versus religious students and pointed out one of the plaintiffs in the case specifically said they are “not particularly religious” in the court documents.
“The policy across the board is all students at Bethel schools — regardless of their religion, regardless of their race — are allowed to use a restroom that is consistent with their gender identity,” Knight said.
Knight argued it’s only a problem for the religious students using the restroom when the transgender student happens to be in the bathroom as well.
“Her risk is every time she shows up at school to go to the bathroom and is using the restroom that she gender identifies with, it’s going to be a problem for her, and there’s going to be anxiety,” Knight said. “But for the religious students, I’ll call them as a group, they only have a problem if (the transgender student) is in the bathroom at the same time they are. That’s why I think that the injury is different for the two of them.”
There are no further hearings or arguments scheduled for the case, so both parties now await a ruling.
The Ohio House passed a bathroom ban bill over the summer. The bathroom ban bill was woven into Senate Bill 104, which revises the College Credit Plus Program and the bill heads back to the Senate to concur. The Ohio Senate is scheduled to resume Nov. 13.
The bill would ban transgender students from using the bathroom and locker rooms that match up with their gender identity.
Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on X.
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