The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a transgender boy may use the boys’ bathroom in a South Carolina public high school while he pursues a challenge to a state law requiring students to use the bathrooms for their sex as “determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.”
The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It applied to a single student and stressed that it was “not a ruling on the merits of the legal issues presented in the litigation” but rather “based on the standards applicable for obtaining emergency relief.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch noted dissents but did not offer reasons.
The court has addressed transgender rights in other contexts, ruling in 2020 that a federal civil rights law protects transgender workers while upholding in June a Tennessee law prohibiting some medical treatments for transgender youth. In the term that starts next month, the court will consider two cases testing the constitutionality of state laws that bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The South Carolina case involves a 14-year-old student, identified in court papers as John Doe. He challenged the state’s bathroom law, first adopted in 2024, saying it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause and Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs that receive federal money.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last month ordered school officials to let the student use the boys’ bathroom while the litigation is pending, saying that one of its precedents required it.
“Doe is a 14-year-old student who simply wishes to use the restroom,” Judge Albert Diaz, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote in a concurring opinion. “Doing so is a biological necessity. Doing so in restrooms that match his gender identity is his right under our precedent.”
In a second concurring opinion, Judge G. Steven Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote that he believed the appeals court’s precedent was wrong but binding. “One can only hope,” he wrote, quoting an earlier opinion, “that the Supreme Court will take the opportunity with all deliberate speed to resolve these questions of national importance.”
In that 2020 precedent, Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, the appeals court ruled that a Virginia school had violated the Constitution and Title IX when it refused to allow Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy, to use the boys’ restroom. The Supreme Court in 2021 refused to hear the state’s appeal, over the dissents of Justices Thomas and Alito.
In the South Carolina case, lawyers for the state filed an emergency application urging the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the legal landscape had changed with its decision in June in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning some medical treatments for transgender minors.
The South Carolina law, the application said, represents a “considered judgment about the harms of allowing male students to use female restrooms and vice versa.”
“After much debate,” it went on, “lawmakers chose to protect privacy and safety for students. The Fourth Circuit ignored the people’s judgment and failed to defer to the public interest in favor of the preferences of one student.”
In response, lawyers for the student wrote that the Supreme Court had better things to do with its time than rule on a case affecting a single ninth-grade child.
When the Supreme Court in 2020 ruled in favor of transgender rights in the workplace, Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the ruling was limited.
“We do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms or anything else of the kind,” he wrote then.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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