WASHINGTON — Tuesday is the first day of school for students in Stafford County in Virginia, and for a sixth-grade transgender girl it’s back to a situation her lawyer says causes her daily pain and hinders her ability to simply be a kid.
The sixth-grader, who was born male but identifies as female, is barred from using the girls’ bathroom at school.
“What they’re requiring my client to do is to use a single-user restroom that is right off a very busy hallway [and] that is now designated a unisex bathroom,” said Asaf Orr, staff attorney for the Transgender Youth Project.
The case is similar to that of Gloucester County, Virginia, high school senior Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy who sued after being barred from using the boys’ bathroom.
Orr says the unisex bathroom is no solution for his client.
“Our client still feels very singled out,” he said. “It requires her to duck into a restroom while all these kids are watching. It’s also very far from her classes. It’s absolutely having a detrimental effect on her mental health and to be a kid at school and grow academically and emotionally.”
Orr added, “She is a girl; she has always has been a girl, and she really wants to be able to go to school and know that not only [do] her peers see her as a girl but also her school,” Orr said.
Orr says discussions are ongoing with Stafford County, but the school board appears to be awaiting the outcome of the Grimm case in Gloucester County. While the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Grimm, the U.S. Supreme Court has stayed the ruling until the justices decide whether to hear Grimm’s case.
