On September 10, 2025, the National Women’s Law Center, alongside 17 other organizations dedicated to students’ rights, filed an amicus brief before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in A.C. v. Metropolitan School District of Martinsville. In this long-running challenge to an Indiana school district’s policy that excludes transgender students from bathroom facilities consistent with their gender identity, the Seventh Circuit will now consider whether to affirm their earlier decision finding that exclusionary bathroom policies may violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools.
Our brief asks the Seventh Circuit to maintain faith in their earlier decisions, including the landmark Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District case from 2017 that first found that exclusionary bathroom policies may violate transgender students’ rights. We explain that the Seventh Circuit’s earlier reasoning is undisturbed by the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which the Supreme Court majority had expressly limited to the context of medical treatments, and that Title IX’s broad command to dismantle sex-based discrimination in schools should be applied, especially when exclusionary bathroom policies exacerbate adverse conditions for transgender students and gender policing that also harms cisgender girls who do not conform to inappropriate gender stereotypes.
Read the amicus brief here.