USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Date Filed: 07/14/2021 Page: 7 of 80
School District did confirm, however, that neither of the female students expressed privacy or safety concerns. The School District also confirmed it was unaware of a single negative incident involving a transgender student using a restroom. There were no complaints from boy students who shared bathroom facilities with Mr. Adams. Regardless, school officials gave Mr. Adams two choices: use a single-stall bathroom in the school office, or use the girls’ bathroom.
In issuing this warning to Mr. Adams, Nease High School administrators were acting to enforce the School District’s unwritten bathroom policy. For “as long as anybody can remember,” the School District has maintained a policy that, for restroom use, “boys go to boys’ rooms, [and] girls go to girls’ rooms.” But school administrators came to enforce the unwritten bathroom policy against Mr. Adams in September 2015, when he was directed not to use the boys’ bathroom. That unwritten policy assigns students to use bathrooms based solely on the sex indicated on a student’s enrollment documents.
The unwritten bathroom policy came to be adopted in the context of the School District’s reexamination of its policies toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (collectively, “LGBTQ”) students. Through its research on LGBTQ policies, the School District learned that other school districts—in Florida and in other states—permitted transgender students to use the restroom according to their gender identity, as opposed to the sex assigned to them at birth. But the
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