USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Document: 304-1 Date Filed: 12/30/2022 Page: 102 of 150
the football quarterback could come in and say I feel like a girl today and so I want to be able to use the girls’ room.
Doc. 161 at 213.
Other members of the taskforce and School Board witnesses echoed these concerns. The Deputy Superintendent for Operations of the School District, Cathy Ann Mittelstadt, testified that “if someone [has] to go [to the restroom] and perhaps undress or clean up a stain on their clothing … , they ha[ve] that opportunity to enter that area and receive that privacy.” Id. at 248. Frank D. Upchurch, III, a long-time School District attorney, testified that the bathroom policy probably prevented “people with untoward intentions” from “do[ing] things they ought not do.” Doc. 162 at 112. To summarize the evidence at trial, witnesses representing the taskforce and the School District voiced two concerns with permitting transgender students to use the restrooms matching their gender identity: student privacy and student safety.
At the conclusion of its work, the taskforce produced the Best Practice Guidelines, which were then adopted by the School District. The Best Practices Guidelines address transgender students specifically, providing that “[t]ransgender students will be given access to a gender-neutral restroom and will not be required to use the restroom corresponding to their biological sex.” Doc. 152-6 at 1. Apart from offering gender-neutral bathrooms to transgender students as an alternative, the Best Practices Guidelines did nothing to alter the longstanding bathroom policy of
