USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Date Filed: 07/14/2021 Page: 8 of 80
School District took a different course. Instead, the District adopted a policy that required that a student use either a designated single-stall restroom or the bathroom corresponding to the sex listed on the student’s enrollment documents. Students who fail to abide by the bathroom policy could be disciplined for violating the student code of conduct.
Because Mr. Adams enrolled in St. Johns County schools in the fourth grade as “female,” the School District’s policy would not allow him to use the boys’ restroom, despite Adams’s updated legal documents and verified course of medical treatment. In other words, the School District rejected Mr. Adams’s updated legal documents reflecting his sex in favor of the outdated information in his enrollment package. And the School District conceded that, because of the policy’s exclusive focus on documents provided at the time of enrollment, a transgender male student who provides documents showing his sex as male at the time of enrollment may use the boys’ bathroom.
The policy barred Mr. Adams from using the boys’ bathroom. As a result, he felt “alienated and humiliated” every time he “walk[ed] past the boys’ restroom on his way to a gender-neutral bathroom, knowing every other boy is permitted to use it but him.” Mr. Adams believed the bathroom policy sent “a message to other students who [saw Adams] use a ‘special bathroom’ that he is different.” Throughout his freshman and sophomore years, he and his mother asked the
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