Bias In The Court

Can you imagine going before a judge that said you have a mental disorder and not recognizing you true gender?

Attorneys for Transgender Student Ask for New Judge
ABC News
By Larry O'Dell, AP
October 21, 2015

A judge who repeatedly referred to a transgender student's "mental disorder" should be removed from presiding over the teenager's lawsuit challenging a policy that bars him from using the boys' restrooms at his high school, his attorneys said in court papers Wednesday.

Attorneys for 16-year-old Gavin Grimm also said U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar of Norfolk has made statements indicating he may be suspicious of modern medical science regarding gender identity and that he objected to lawyers publicizing their client's transgender status.

Doumar did not immediately respond to a telephone message from the The Associated Press.

Grimm's lawyers asked for a new judge in a 58-page brief asking the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse two key rulings in the case. Doumar refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have allowed Grimm to use the boys' bathrooms when the new school year started in September, and he threw out a claim that the policy violates federal sex discrimination law. He has not yet ruled on Grimm's claim that the policy violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause.

It was President Reagan who nominated Doumar to a seat on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He was a friend of President Reagan and shared Regan’s conservative beliefs.

The Buzz Feed had this to say about the case,

But Doumar announced midway through Monday’s hearing that he was throwing out that argument. “Your case in Title IX is gone, by the way,” he told ACLU staff attorney Joshua Block, who argued on Grimm’s behalf. “I have chosen to dismiss Title IX. I decided that before we started.”

The announcement was unexpected not only because it diverges from the recent legal trend on the question of whether sex discrimination bans include anti-transgender discrimination, but also because a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice who had come to argue in Grimm’s favor on the Title IX question had not yet been given a chance to speak.
[…]
But Doumar pointed out that Title IX allows segregating single-sex facilities in general, like restrooms and locker rooms, for male and female students. And as such, he appeared to argue, transgender students can be segregated as well based on their birth sex. He suggested birth sex is solely at issue in Title IX, not a person’s chosen gender.

The article also pointed out that this is not an isolated case.

The school board’s arguments leaned heavily on a Pennsylvania case, in which a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit in March filed by a transgender college student who raised similar arguments to those in Grimm’s case. Because it is acceptable to separate male and female restrooms generally, Judge Kim R. Gibson found that a transgender student may be barred from a restroom based on his or her sex at birth.