Transgender man Gavin Grimm’s seven-plus-year battle to be allowed to use the gender-appropriate bathroom at his high school finally ended today when the U.S. Supreme Court left in place a lower court ruling in his favor. And the LGBTQ community, worried over how the now-conservative leaning SCOTUS would rule, has heaved a collective sigh of relief.

“I am glad that my years-long fight to have my school see me for who I am is over. Being forced to use the nurse’s room, a private bathroom and the girl’s room was humiliating for me, and having to go to out-of-the-way bathrooms severely interfered with my education,” Grimm said in a statement today (Monday, June 28).

He added, “Trans youth deserve to use the bathroom in peace without being humiliated and stigmatized by their own school boards and elected officials.”

The court voted 7-2 to leave in place the appellate court ruling in Grimm’s favor. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken up the case in the court’s next term.

This is the second SCOTUS ruling in just over 12 months to support sex-based discrimination as prohibiting anti-trans discrimination. The Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, issued June 15, 2020, declared that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protecting against sex-based discrimination in employment includes employment protections for transgender individuals, too.

Grimm’s fight began when he started high school and came out as transgender and began using the boys’ restroom at school. That prompted the Gloucester County, Va. School board to pass a rule requiring students to use gender-specific bathrooms based on their “biological” gender, or gender assigned at birth, or for trans students at the high school — in other words, Grimm ‚ to use one of three unisex bathrooms that they had installed.

Even after Grimm began hormone treatments, underwent top surgery and had his name and gender marker changed on his state-issued I.D., the school continued to discriminate. (Even after he graduated, the school continued to discriminate by refusing to issue his diploma and tranascripts under his legal name and gender.)

So in June 2015, Grimm and his parents sued the school board under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Obama Administration had interpreted Title IX to prohibit anti-trans discrimination as a form of sex-based discrimination, but the Trump Administration reversed that ruling. The 4th U.S. Circuit had ruled in Grimm’s favor, and the school board had appealed to the Supreme Court. But after the Trump administration reversed the Obama administration guidance on Title IX, the Supreme Court basically vacated the appellate court ruling and sent the case back down to the district court level to start over.

The case again worked its way up through the court system, and this time, the 4th Circuit court cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock in ruling for Grimm.

— Tammye Nash