TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge has rejected a challenge to Florida’s 2021 law banning transgender students from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman issued a 39-page ruling Monday granting a request by attorneys for Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. and the state Board of Education to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of a transgender high school volleyball player.
Altman ruled that the controversial law did not violate constitutional rights to equal protection and due process or Title IX, a federal law that prevents discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs. He left open the possibility that lawyers for the Broward County student, identified by the initials D.N., could file a revised lawsuit on the protection and Title IX issues.
Lawyers for the state argued that the law was designed to help ensure athletic opportunities for girls and women who want to play interscholastic or college sports. They contended that those opportunities could be threatened by the participation of transgender women who were identified as biological males at birth.
Altman said he found that “promoting equality for women in athletics is an important state interest” and denied that the law (SB 1028) discriminated on the basis of stereotypes.
“In our case, SB 1028’s gender classifications are based on real differences between the sexes – not stereotypes. By requiring schools to designate sports team members based on biological sex, the law adopts the uncontroversial proposition that most men and women have different (and innate) physical characteristics. To ignore these real differences would frustrate the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause, which is to uphold the principle that ‘all persons similarly situated should be treated alike,'” he wrote, citing legal precedent in part.
Altman also wrote that the law “does not even come close to creating the kind of caste-like system that the Constitution forbids – a system in which transgender girls are legally demeaned and degraded because of their gender identity”.
“Most importantly, like laws prohibiting the blind from flying airplanes or the HIV-infected from donating blood, SB 1028 is tailored to serve an important and well-established state interest – promoting gender equality by preserving athletic opportunities for girls,” the ruling said. “In this respect, it’s not at all like the kinds of laws that the Equal Protection Clause clearly forbids – laws that, for example, prohibited black Americans from eating in the same restaurants, drinking from the same water fountains, attending the same schools, and swimming on the same beaches as white Americans. These laws – untethered to any legitimate government interest – degraded blacks (because of their race) across broad swaths of American social life.
Lawyers for the transgender girl filed the lawsuit in June 2021, after the Republican-controlled legislature and Governor Ron DeSantis approved the ban. The case was put on hold while the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals considered a separate case challenging a St Johns County school board policy that prevented a transgender male student, Drew Adams, from using boys’ restrooms.
The Atlanta-based appeals court upheld the St Johns County policy in December, prompting Altman to revive the transgender athlete case in January.
In a March filing, lawyers for the Broward County volleyball player described the law as part of a “larger national effort to scapegoat this protected class”.
“The law must be viewed against the backdrop of the avalanche of anti-Transgender and anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country, and also in the context of Florida’s ever-increasing legislative hostility towards LGBTQ individuals,” the lawyers argued.
But in its motion to dismiss the case, filed in February, the state denied that the law was intended to discriminate or violate constitutional rights.
“SB 1028 does draw a classification based on sex, but the classification is constitutionally permissible because the state has important governmental interests in segregating athletic teams based on sex and prohibiting biological males from joining teams designated for biological females: protecting biological females’ equal participation in school athletics and remedying the historical underrepresentation of females in athletic competition,” the motion said. “Because the challenged law is substantially related to the achievement of these important goals, it does not violate equal protection.”