The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously to uphold an Idaho law that protects the privacy, safety, and dignity of all K-12 students in public school locker rooms, showers, restrooms, and overnight stays. Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, together with attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the 9th Circuit in December to uphold a district court decision affirming the law while the case proceeds.
Last March, Idaho enacted a law protecting children’s privacy by ensuring that sex-specific facilities in K-12 public schools like showers, locker rooms, restrooms, and overnight accommodations remained sex-specific, while also allowing single-user facilities. But activists sued Idaho State Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield and the State Board of Education last July, demanding that K-12 public schools force girls to share private spaces with males and vice-versa.
In its opinion in Roe v. Critchfield, the unanimous 9th Circuit saw “no argument at this stage that mandatory segregation of overnight stays on the basis of ‘biological sex’ is not substantially related to the State’s interests in not exposing students to the unclothed bodies of students of the opposite sex; and protecting students from having to expose their own unclothed bodies to students of the opposite sex.”
