The History and Significance of Adams v. St. Johns County School Board

January 2, 2023

Happy New Year!

This post is available for paid subscribers only. As always, thank you for your generous support, which helps me continue in the fight to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex.

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The case of Adams v. St. Johns County School Board had been pending before the federal judiciary for about five and half years when, on December 30, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an en banc (full court) ruling that schools may, under both the Constitution and Title IX, maintain sex-specific bathrooms and refuse to allow students to use the bathrooms assigned to members of the opposite sex on the basis of the students’ “gender identity.” This is a big deal. 

Most people predict that it’s headed for the Supreme Court. If it does end up there, that will give the Supreme Court an opportunity to revisit Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), where it ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or “transgender status” constitutes unlawful sex discrimination, without telling us what it might have meant by “transgender status.” It will also give the Court an opportunity to answer a question, explicitly left open in Bostock, about whether its reasoning applies outside of the employment context.