Gregg Owen

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Federal court rules against trans student’s right to use the correct bathroom

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Florida has reversed a lower court ruling that granted access to boys’ restrooms for a trans student in the state. The 7-4 decision said the student’s civil rights were not violated under either the Equal Protection Clause or Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

The vote was split for and against between Republican and Democratic appointees.

The Eleventh Circuit’s decision is a break with the Fourth and Seventh Circuit Courts, which found in favor of trans students in similar cases presenting the same issues.

In 2017, Drew Adams, a trans student at Nease High School in St. Johns County, Florida sued the state for access to bathrooms that conform to his gender identity. The state claimed Adams had to use a restroom that aligns with his “biological sex.” Adams was born female.

The story made headlines as one of the first test cases for transgender rights in Florida and sparked a far-right backlash exploited by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in his push for the Parental Rights in Education Act, also known as the Don’t Say Gay law.

At trial in December 2017, the court heard testimony that Adams identified as male from a young age and used the boys’ restrooms in St. Johns’ schools without incident. When he started high school, Adams continued the practice, without issue from fellow male classmates. Girls at the school, however, complained to school administrators.

While the school district had established rules that honored trans students’ desired names and pronouns, they refused to let trans students use single-sex facilities, insisting students would be treated according to the sex on their birth certificate.

By the time Adams was at trial, his transition was well underway with gender-affirming hormone therapy, a legal name change, and a new birth certificate identifying him as male. The school district, however, maintained that Adams’ sex was fixed at the time of enrollment.

In 2018,  U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Corrigan, a George W. Bush appointee, found for Adams, saying the school district’s policy violated both his equal protection and Title IX rights. In particular, the school district’s admission that Adams would be allowed to use boys’ restrooms had he enrolled with his current birth certificate undermined their argument that the district had an “important governmental interest” in protecting the privacy of cisgender boys in those facilities.

Two three-judge 11th Circuit Court panels agreed before the full court reversed those decisions on December 30.

In her opinion for the majority, Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Trump appointee, avoided identifying Adams by he/him pronouns, instead using only his surname repeatedly. She also wrote a separate, concurring opinion detailing why a ruling in Adams’ favor would dismantle girls’ school sports, an issue not relevant to the appeal.

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Journalist & friend attacked & called homophobic slurs in gayborhood

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A journalist for the Manchester Evening News and his companion were verbally and physically harassed last week in the city’s iconic Gay Village.

“He started to get right up in my face, pushing me, shoving me, grabbing me and kicking me in the legs quite hard, then he went to go towards my friend. He said, ‘You are in my space, you are trying to touch me, you queer.’”

Daniel McLaughlin, 28, a podcast producer at Manchester’s largest news daily, was waiting for a taxi with his nonbinary friend in the early hours of Friday morning after a night out in the city’s popular gayborhood centered around Canal Street. McLaughlin, who identifies as bisexual, was wearing a rainbow badge.

LGBTQ Nation

McLaughlin told the Evening News he noticed a man who appeared to be in his early 20s heading towards them from nearby Sackville Gardens.

The man was “muttering to himself,” McLaughlin said, then directed “absolute hatred” towards them. “He was calling us nonces, fa***ts, perverts, every homophobic slur under the sun. He fixated on calling us names.”

“I started saying, ‘We’re not nonces, we’re puffs, there’s a difference,’ to which he became more aggrieved, shouting the same slurs. He was clearly inebriated, clearly angry about something.”

McLaughlin recounted that as a taxi pulled up, the “aggressive drunk” pushed him onto the moving vehicle, then continued to hurl abuse and followed McLaughlin as he tried to get into the taxi on the other side.

As the man was shouting “Get in the f**king car right now!” McLaughlin and his friend managed to get inside and pull the door shut. The driver sped away quickly from the ugly scene.

Daniel said the “old slurs” hurled at the pair were “nothing original,” but the young man’s age and level of aggression had shocked him.

“It didn’t particularly hurt,” McLaughlin said. “He was drunk, they were not focused attacks. But the thing I found the worst was the absolute hatred in his eyes, just the aggression and hatred towards us.”

“We hadn’t done anything. We had stood outside. But there was absolute hatred towards us, and the fact this guy was our age, to come up with this vitriol.”

“My theory was, he had all this pent up aggression. I think he went to the Gay Village looking for a fight. He went there with the purpose of starting trouble. The words he was using were recycled, words he had clearly heard elsewhere. Just archaic, older insults.”

“He wasn’t making arguments, he was just using the words, he wasn’t stringing a full sentence together.”

McLaughlin says he didn’t report the incident to police, believing there was “very little they could have done.” While he didn’t suffer any major injuries from the attack, McLaughlin said it did raise concerns about the safety of the LGBTQ community away from the Village itself.

“It’s something that’s not untypical, and that’s the frightening thing really. I moved to Manchester in 2012 for university and one of the big reasons was the Gay Village — I wasn’t quite out the closet at the time, but — having this place where I could be myself.”

“That’s why so many gay people move to Manchester, but in recent years it’s not felt like a sanctuary. It’s not necessarily aggressive, but I feel that the queer community is being pushed out.”

“The village itself I think would be safe, but because we had just left the Gay Village at Sackville Gardens, just a bit further away, that’s where the protection ends. I do feel trepidation when I exit the Village.”

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Police are four times more likely to stop transgender people for “reasonable suspicion”

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A new draft report from the California Attorney General’s office indicates transgender people in the state are stopped by police at vastly different rates than cisgender men and women.

The report is based on data reported from 58 of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies and shows transgender people were stopped because of “reasonable suspicion” alone —instead of a specific violation or clearly unlawful behavior — in nearly half the stops.

For transgender people, the proportion of “reasonable suspicion” stops was 44%, or four times the ratio for cisgender people.

The data includes all people stopped by police, regardless of whether the officers were responding to a potential offense they observed or to a call for service.

California requires police departments to report the demographic data of every driver, bicyclist, or pedestrian they stop, including perceived race, gender, and approximate age.

The new state data shows that transgender women are stopped due to an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” in more than 45% of encounters when they were stopped in 2021. Trans men were stopped for the same reason 43% of the time.

Interactions with police officers were also more likely to lead to more drastic outcomes – with transgender people more likely to be searched, handcuffed, and arrested – and to have lethal and non-lethal force used against them.

Reasonable suspicion is a legal standard that requires officers to articulate why they believe a person is likely engaged in a crime. Probable cause, the standard required to arrest someone, has a higher bar.

Under the 2015 Racial and Identity Profiling Act, or RIPA, law enforcement agencies with 334 or more officers were required to report data to the state for 2021. The reporting requirement expands to all police agencies for data collected this year.

Alex Binsfeld, legal director at the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, an advocacy group in San Francisco, told the San Francisco Chronicle that gender biases result in officers focusing on transgender people because they don’t fit their notions of how a woman or man ought to look.

“It’s in effect a way to enforce Western gender binary norms on appearance, that you will be punished if you are not gender binary in your appearance,” they said. “Policing of trans folks at these disparate rates has led advocates to argue it’s a status crime.”

Cisgender people, who made up the overwhelming majority of the total number of stops statewide, were stopped for traffic violations the majority of the time. Cisgender women were stopped because of an officer’s “reasonable suspicion” in less than nine percent of encounters; cisgender men were stopped because of an officer’s suspicion in 11% of encounters.

Out of 3.2 million total stops, transgender people accounted for 4,740.

Transgender advocates scored a major victory in July when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed S.B. 357, a bill repealing a notorious “walking while trans” law. Effective January 1, the bill repeals a 1995 law that prohibits loitering in public places with the “intent to commit prostitution.” The voided statute allows police to cite people they find suspicious due to factors like how they dress or where they stand on the street.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who sponsored S.B. 357, said the sweeping loitering law causes innocent people to get swept up in the criminal justice system and makes sex workers less safe because they fear seeking out law enforcement.

“Even one arrest can have such profound implications for someone’s life,” Wiener said. “It’s one step; there’s certainly more work to do.”