By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed another case involving transgender issues, declining on Monday to hear an attempt to revive a lawsuit against a Wisconsin public school district over a policy supporting gender identity of students that some parents questioned on religious grounds. rights and other grounds.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a group of parents of students in the Eau Claire Area School District, backed by two conservative legal groups, against a lower court’s ruling that they lacked the necessary legal standing to file the lawsuit.
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The Wisconsin lawsuit is one of several legal disputes over transgender players playing in the United States, including which bathroom facilities they can use and which sports teams they can join.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, heard a major case on transgender rights on December 4. It appeared inclined to uphold a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender youth, in a challenge to the law from Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration.
The Eau Claire School District has adopted a policy that allows students to change their names and preferred pronouns and use the bathroom that matches their gender identity without prior notice or parental consent.
The lawsuit, brought by conservative legal groups America First Legal and Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, was filed in 2022 by a group called Parents Protecting Our Children. Prosecutors said the district’s policy violates parents’ rights to freedom of religion under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and violates due process under the 14th Amendment.
Most of the group’s members hold religious beliefs that “there are only two genders” and “would not immediately ‘affirm’ their children’s beliefs about their gender,” the lawsuit said.
The school district said challengers have “grossly” mischaracterized its policies aimed at providing an inclusive school environment, and that any plan made to address the needs of transgender, nonbinary or gender non- compliant students is available to parents in the student’s school file.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker ruled that the challengers themselves were not injured and therefore did not have the legal standing to file a lawsuit. No one claimed that their child is transgender or that the district applied the policy to their child, the judge ruled. The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in March.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
