The Freedom From Religion Foundation is warning the Francis Howell School District of many constitutional and statutory rights it risks violating if it adopts two anti-transgender policies at today’s meeting.
FFRF’s Equal Justice Works Fellow Kat Grant and Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi wrote to the district’s board of education that proposed anti-trans policies violate Title IX, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment and Missouri state laws.
“That is an unholy trifecta of laws being violated,” the duo wrote.
Policy 2116 would require that students use the bathroom conforming to the sex markers on their birth certificates. The second is Regulation 6116, which would prohibit district employees or contracted personnel from discussing human sexuality with any students except when part of a “group discussion of current events….”
The adoption of these policies present potential issues with the Establishment Clause separating state and church. In a 2023 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that there is a major network of primarily conservative Christian organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and Focus on the Family behind the large volume of misinformation and pseudoscience being disseminated about transgender people. These policies not only restrict district employees from being able to engage in understandings of gender and gender identity outside of the one being advanced by these religious organizations, but also require them to coerce students into complying with a single theological understanding of these topics. This goes far beyond what is permissible under both the First Amendment and the Missouri Constitution.
“The Constitution does not fall short of transgender students. On the whole, both provisions that FHSD’s Board will consider today are unlawful, unenforceable, and greatly increase the litigation risk the District assumes. The district should vote against both policies, or risk litigation,” the pair concluded.
“George Washington once said that the ‘Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, persecution no assistance,’” adds Joshi, a Missouri-licensed attorney. “Defiantly, Francis Howell’s School Board gives the bigots and persecutors a pretty safe home. That’s pretty on-brand for Missouri. These school board members are just school bullies.”
“Transgender rights are serving as a proxy war for Christian nationalist ideals surrounding gender roles and bodily autonomy, and courts across the country have taken different stances on the constitutionality of banning gender-affirming health care,” notes Grant, whose fellowship projects tackle the intersection of LGBTQIA-plus rights and state/church separation. “But to go after queer kids, who are still figuring things out, and are more likely to be bullied by their peers anyways? That’s a different kind of animus and hatred.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 40,000 members across the country, including more than 400 in Missouri. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
