A federal appeals court has declined to block an Idaho law requiring public school students to use only the restroom and changing facilities corresponding to their “biological sex,” ruling that it likely does not violate the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause or Title IX.
The decision is the latest development in a high-stakes national debate over the rights of transgender students and a reminder that the courts are weighing in even as the Trump administration has sought through executive orders and public statements to assert that there are only two sexes and that schools should not assist students’ gender transitions.
At least 11 states have such restroom bans in place, according to the Associated Press.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, is notable because another panel of that court previously blocked a separate Idaho law that barred transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports.
The court in that earlier case, in an opinion initially filed in 2023 but amended in 2024, said discrimination based on transgender status was a form of sex discrimination and that the sports law was likely unconstitutional. Proponents of the sports law have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The new decision involves the 2023 Idaho law on restrooms and facilities, which was challenged by a transgender student identified in court papers as Rebecca Roe and the Sexuality and Gender Alliance at Boise High School.
A federal district court declined to block the law, though the 9th Circuit temporarily issued an injunction that kept it from taking effect during the 2023-24 school year.
Court lends credence to Idaho’s student privacy and safety goals
Under its March 20 decision in Roe v. Critchfield, the 9th Circuit panel agreed that the Idaho restroom and facilities law discriminates based on sex and transgender status. Thus, the law must survive a heightened level of judicial scrutiny to pass muster under the equal-protection clause, the panel said.
But the court concluded that Idaho met that burden because the law cites the legislature’s objectives as “protecting the privacy and safety of all students” specifically “in restrooms and changing facilities where such persons might be in a partial or full state of undress in the presence of others.”
The state has a substantial interest in “(1) not exposing students to the unclothed bodies of students of the opposite sex; and (2) protecting students from having to expose their own unclothed bodies to students of the opposite sex,” said the opinion by Judge Morgan Christen, an appointee of President Barack Obama. He was joined by Judges Kim McLane Wardlaw, a President Bill Clinton appointee, and Mark J. Bennett, a first-term appointee of President Donald Trump.
This case was the “unusual situation in which the state’s privacy justification is easily corroborated by common experience and circuit precedent,” Christen said. “That some students in a state of partial undress may experience embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury in the presence of students of a different sex is neither novel nor implausible.”
The court also declined to block the Idaho law as a violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in federally funded schools.
The court said it agreed that Idaho did not have adequate notice, when it accepted federal funds, “that Title IX prohibits the exclusion of transgender students from restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, and overnight lodging corresponding to their gender identity.”
The panel gave a brief discussion in a footnote to the recent debate over conflicting interpretations of Title IX by the Biden administration’s 2024 final regulation, which sought to protect transgender students but was struck down by a federal district judge in January, and President Trump’s executive orders and other public statements seeking to limit transgender rights at school.
“We express no opinion” on whether the Biden or Trump administration’s actions give notice to the states that a law such as Idaho’s excluding transgender students from facilities that “align with their gender identity” would violate Title IX, the court said.
