Missouri Supreme Court rejects transgender student’s sex discrimination claim

JEFFERSON CITY — The Missouri Supreme Court has rejected a transgender student’s claim that he faced sex discrimination when the Blue Springs School District denied him access to single-sex locker rooms and bathrooms.

The case did not seek a ruling on the constitutionality of school districts barring transgender students from sex-designated spaces. Instead, it centered around whether evidence presented in Jackson County Circuit Court was sufficient to rule on the student’s claims of sex discrimination.

In 2021, a Jackson County jury sided with the student, identified by his initials R.M.A. in court proceedings, and awarded him over $4 million in damages. But Circuit Judge Cory Atkins threw out the verdict in a move that is reserved for “a complete absence of probative fact to support the jury’s conclusion.”

The Supreme Court’s 5-2 ruling on Tuesday, written by Judge Kelly Broniec, affirmed Atkins’ decision. R.M.A. had not proven that he was discriminated against on the basis of male sex but instead shown discrimination based on female genitalia, Broniec wrote.

“Although R.M.A. argues the school district’s consideration of genitalia is inherently sex-related, the only evidence adduced at trial was that the school district’s decisions were based on the fact that R.M.A. had female genitalia,” she wrote in the court’s decision.

R.M.A. amended his birth certificate during his time as a student, and his physician testified in circuit court that he is a male. The only evidence of female genitalia in the case is the original birth certificate the district received when R.M.A. enrolled.

Dissenting opinions from Judges Paul Wilson and Brent Powell say there was too much evidence to allow a judge to overturn a jury’s verdict.

“There was more than enough other evidence from which the jury could find R.M.A.’s male sex was a contributing factor in the district’s discriminatory conduct,” Wilson wrote.

Powell opined that the jury had the “role of deciding what evidence to believe.”

Another piece discussed during the case’s oral arguments in Februarywas whether discrimination based on genitalia constitutes “sex stereotyping.”

“It’s very clear that the plaintiff’s sex was the reason for this discrimination,” R.M.A.’s attorney Alexander Edelman said in February. “In that he was a male who was assigned female at birth and so he differed from other males.”

The majority opinion rejected the argument, arguing that genitalia is intrinsic to biological sex.

“A person’s biological sex… is not a stereotype,” it says.

Wilson rebuts that biological sex is more complicated.

“What the dictionary does not say, what no witness testified to or treatise in evidence states, and what no statute or judicial decision provides, is that a person’s sex is always and only determined by that person’s genitalia,” he wrote.

R.M.A.’s case is not the only Missouri lawsuit addressing transgender students’ use of school bathrooms. In 2023, a Platte County School District student filed a lawsuitalleging the district’s policy is discriminatory, and the case is ongoing.