NASHVILLE – The Human Rights Campaign Foundation on Thursday filed suit in U.S. District Court in Nashville on behalf of an 8-year-old Williamson County transgender girl and her family to challenge a 2021 Tennessee law banning transgender public school students from accessing multi-occupant restrooms and other facilities consistent with their gender identity.
The suit names Williamson County Board of Education members, the system’s superintendent well as the Tennessee Department of Education and its commissioner, Penny Schwinn, as defendants.
In a statement to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery’s office said, “We are reviewing the lawsuit. No further comment.”
Court filings charge the 2021 law, the Tennessee Accommodations for All Children Act, is “singling out transgender students for disfavored treatment” and “explicitly writing discrimination against transgender people into state law.”
And that, the suit says, violates “the most basic guarantees of equal protection under the U.S. Constitution and Title IX,” a provision of federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.