USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Document: 304-1 Date Filed: 12/30/2022 Page: 4 of 150
a biological female and identified as a female. At the end of eighth grade, however, Adams began identifying and living as a boy. For example, Adams dressed in boys’ clothing and wore a “chest binder” to flatten breast tissue. Most pertinently for this appeal, Adams adopted the male pronouns “he” and “him” and began using the male bathroom in public.
In August 2015, Adams entered ninth grade at Allen D. Nease High School (“Nease”) within the School District. Nease provides female, male, and sex-neutral bathrooms for its 2,450 students. The communal female bathrooms have stalls, and the communal male bathrooms have stalls and undivided urinals. In addition to performing bodily functions in the communal bathrooms, students engage in other activities, like changing their clothes, in those spaces. Single-stall, sex-neutral bathrooms are provided to accommodate any student, including the approximately five transgender students at Nease, who prefer not to use the bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex. The bathrooms at Nease are ordinarily unsupervised.
The School Board, like many others, maintains a longstanding, unwritten bathroom policy under which male students must use the male bathroom and female students must use the female bathroom. For purposes of this policy, the School Board distinguishes between boys and girls on the basis of biological sex—which the School Board determines by reference to various documents, including birth certificates, that students submit when they first enroll in the School District. The School Board does not accept
