According to his lawyer, the one transgender adolescent in South Carolina who is legally entitled to use his preferred bathroom has left public high school.
According to Public Justice lawyer Alexandra Brodsky, the Berkeley County ninth grader withdrew from his in-person public high school due to prejudice and harassment by staff and peers. In an email, Brodsky stated that the discrimination was motivated by the anonymous teenager’s gender identity.
The Berkeley County School District did not immediately respond to a phone call or email requesting information about Brodsky’s statements.
While the adolescent, John Doe, and his family are still contesting a South Carolina budget regulation in district court, the case was dismissed by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday. According to legal records, South Carolina and the plaintiff have amicably decided to abandon the action.
South Carolina senators inserted a one-year budget item in 2024 that would eliminate some state funds for school districts that let children to use multi-stalled bathrooms or changing facilities that do not correspond to their biological gender. The budget item was implemented again in 2025, therefore it is now effective for the current school year. Doe and his family are questioning the validity of the budget item.
Doe, now in ninth grade, quit public middle school to take classes remotely after being reprimanded for not using the women’s restroom after the budget restriction was implemented. The family decided that distant lessons were inferior to in-person instruction, so they enrolled him in public high school for the current school year.
A federal judge allowed Doe to use the toilet of his gender identity while the lawsuit was being heard in August, one day before the start of the school year. The United States Supreme Court upheld that ruling in September, albeit not unanimously.
According to legal documents, the family filed a class action complaint against the budget provision in federal court in November 2024. The defendants are the state, the Board of Education, the Department of Education, and the Berkeley County School District. That case will proceed in lower court, but it is temporarily on hold until the United States Supreme Court resolves on the merits of a similar case, B.P.J v. West Virginia. The state will continue to argue the issue in district court, according to an attorney general representative.
In B.P.J., the highest court may rule on whether local schools and colleges can prohibit transgender kids from participating in gender-specific teams.
