USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Date Filed: 07/14/2021 Page: 47 of 80
evaluate claims brought under the Equal Protection Clause. Majority Op. at 34 n.10. The majority also contends that the figure of 99.96 percent “simply underscores how limited the ruling today is, which … applies only to Adams.” Id. at 35. To the contrary, all students—not only Adams or the 0.04 percent of students who are transgender—are potentially affected by a ruling that forces them to share bathrooms with individuals of the opposite sex.
The majority’s feigned outrage on behalf of Adams likewise misses the point. The majority asserts that comparing Adams’s attempted use of the boys’ restroom to committing tax fraud, evading the draft, or reporting inaccurate information on the census is “unfortunate” because “Adams has been nothing but honest.” Id. at 21 n.6. But Adams’s honesty has nothing to do with the issue at hand. The school district asks students to report their sex, not their gender identity or “governmentally-recognized legal sex.” Id. at 15. So if Adams reports gender identity or “governmentally-recognized legal sex” instead of sex, then Adams has reported inaccurate information. And it is irrelevant that Adams has supporting legal documentation because the school district is not asking students to report their “governmentally-recognized legal sex.”
The majority’s second reason that the schools’ method of determining students’ sex is impermissibly arbitrary is similarly unpersuasive. “[W]ithout justification,” it says, the schools prefer older documents to newer documents,
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