School District’s Trans Student Bathroom Policy Remains Blocked

A transgender girl can’t be forced to use a boys’ bathroom or a single-occupancy, gender-neutral alternative pending trial on her challenge to a school district’s bathroom use policy, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed an order blocking the Mukwonago Area School District from enforcing the policy against the plaintiff, identified as D.P., despite the trial’s judge’s decision to forego an evidentiary hearing before entering it.

This is one in a series of cases challenging school districts’ bathroom policies for transgender students. Several earlier decisions, including two from the Seventh Circuit, struck down similar guidelines. Anti-trans rights advocates are now pushing to undo those rulings.

An evidentiary hearing isn’t required if the non-moving party fails to raise genuine issues of material fact in its response to a preliminary injunction motion, Chief Judge Diane S. Sykes said in her opinion for the court.

The school district never disputed D.P.'s submissions, so there were no factual issues for the trial judge to resolve here, Sykes said. The school district, moreover, never requested a preliminary injunction hearing.

The school district adopted the bathroom policy after receiving complaints about D.P.'s use of the girls’ restroom at her school. D.P. and her mother sued the district alleging the policy violated her rights under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

A trial judge entered a temporary restraining order preventing the policy’s enforcement pending trial, then converted it to a preliminary injunction five days later. D.P. was likely to win on the merits because Seventh Circuit precedent declaring such policies to be an unlawful form of sex discrimination squarely controlled the case, the district judge said.

D.P.'s case differed slightly from those previously decided by the Seventh Circuit, but the differences didn’t undermine the district judge’s conclusion that she was likely to succeed on her claims, the court said.

The court also declined the school district’s invitation to overrule the earlier decisions, though it noted that the US Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in United States v. Skrmetti may affect its future analysis of D.P.'s claims. The Skrmetti court is expected to determine if a Tennessee law barring gender-affirming care for minors violates the youths’ equal protection rights.

Judges Frank H. Easterbrook and Thomas L. Kirsch II joined the opinion.

Davis & Pledl SC and Relman Colfax PLLC represent D.P. Buelow Vetter Buikema Olson & Vliet LLC represents the school district.

The case is D.P. v. Mukwonago Area Sch. Dist., 7th Cir., No. 23-2568, 6/12/25.