The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated an earlier ruling favoring a trans-identified student seeking to use the bathrooms based on gender identity rather than biological sex.

The appeals court issued an order on Monday in the case of Drew Adams v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida, granting a full en banc hearing before the 12-member court, vacating a three-judge panel’s earlier decision.

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Born in 2000 as a female but presently identifying as male, Adams was initially allowed to use the boy’s restrooms for six weeks in ninth grade. But eventually, officials barred Adams from doing so.

Although officials gave Adams the alternative of using a gender-neutral, single-stall bathroom, the student filed a lawsuit against the school district on the grounds of discrimination.

In August 2020, the three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit ruled 2-1 in favor of Adams, with the majority opinion arguing that the school board violated federal civil rights law.

Circuit Judge Beverly Martin, an Obama appointee, authored the majority opinion concluding that Adams’ federal Title IX rights were violated by the school standard…

Chief Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, authored a dissenting opinion. He concluded that the 2020 panel majority opinion “distorts the policy, misunderstands the legal claims asserted, and rewrites well-established precedent.”…

Attorneys for the school board argued that the 2020 decision was based on a “hypothetical” situation, according to WWSB.

“The actual policy here, while theoretically imperfect, is substantially related to student bathroom privacy,” the board’s motion for en banc hear reads. “Indeed, the policy perfectly classifies nearly every student in the district, as at the time of the trial, the board was aware of only 16 transgender students out of approximately 40,000. There is no evidence that even those students’ sex as denoted in their enrollment materials did not match their biological sex, and we know that was not the case with Adams. More importantly, the policy classifies all students on the basis of biological sex, without regard to gender identity.”…

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(Excerpted from The Christian Post. Article by Michael Gryboski. Photo Credit: Tim Mossholder).