USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Document: 304-1 Date Filed: 12/30/2022 Page: 99 of 150
And she had never heard about a single privacy concern related to transgender students using the restroom corresponding to their gender identity. Valbrun-Pope learned from her conversations with transgender students and other BCPS officials that “transgender students are not trying to expose parts of their anatomy … [t]hat do[] not align with their gender identity” and are typically discrete in using bathrooms that do not match their birth-assigned sex. Id. at 65.
A BCPS high school principal who worked district-wide on issues involving transgender students, Michelle Kefford, amplified Valbrun-Pope’s observations about the absence of safety and privacy issues arising out of BCPS’s bathroom policy. Kefford testified that she has not “heard of a case anywhere” in which a transgender student has threatened another student’s “safety or privacy” by using a restroom matching the transgender student’s gender identity. Id. at 118. She was unaware of “any child having an issue with a transgender child using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.” Id. Although the students themselves were unbothered by the bathroom policy, she explained, she encountered adults who expressed opposition to the policy. Kefford explained that, in her experience,
[P]eople are afraid of what they don’t understand … [and] a lot of that fear [is because] they haven’t experienced it, they don’t know enough about it, and the first thing that comes to mind is this person wants to go into this bathroom for some other purpose. That’s
