Transgender Battles - Access and Equality

Two years before this conversation, few Americans could have named a transgender public figure; by the time it was recorded, transgender people were at the center of what both sides called a culture war, fought in statehouses, school boards, and the Supreme Court. Why did the bathroom become the battlefield, and what did the law actually say?

In this TalksOnLaw interview, the first of two parts, Joel Cohen sits down with Mara Keisling, founder and then executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, for a primer on terminology, a candid account of her own transition, and a tour of the legal fights of the moment — North Carolina's HB2, the Obama administration's Title IX guidance and its rescission, and the case of Gavin Grimm. The conversation continues in Part 2.

Trans 101 and the Golden Rule

Keisling opens with vocabulary and its limits — "transgender," "trans," "non-binary," and the shifting fortunes of "transsexual" and "transgendered" — and her own advice that the only other thing anyone needs is the golden rule. She describes coming out in her late thirties around 2000, losing a couple of clients and no family, and the state senator who told her in 2002 that five years earlier he would not have let her into his office. The movement, she says, has moved faster than any civil rights movement in American history, because it stands on the ones before it. She draws on NCTE's survey of nearly 28,000 transgender people, then the largest ever conducted, for the figures that run through both parts.

The Bathroom Conversation Nobody Wanted

Keisling is frank that no transgender person wanted to talk about restrooms. She explains why the issue arrived anyway — political opportunity, she argues, rather than any incident — and why the roughly hundred bills introduced since 2014 rarely passed and, she contends, could not be enforced, since "biological sex," birth certificates, and anatomy are not the same thing. She describes the consequences her survey found: people who stop eating and drinking to avoid public restrooms, children who skip breakfast, and a cartoon of two doors marked "get arrested" and "get beat up." To the safety argument for such laws she answers that assault and exposure are already crimes and that the survey data show transgender people as the ones at risk, with nearly half reporting sexual assault in their lifetimes.

HB2

The centerpiece is North Carolina's House Bill 2, which Keisling describes as a labor and preemption bill wrapped in a transgender provision — it barred cities from raising minimum wages or enacting anti-discrimination protections broader than the state's — and the response: canceled concerts and conventions, corporate pullbacks, sports associations relocating events, and an estimated economic cost in the billions that, she argues, produced the partial repeal and taught other legislatures to steer clear. She contrasts California's new law making single-occupancy restrooms gender-neutral, a change she predicts most people will not notice.

Schools, Title IX, and Gavin Grimm

The segment closes on students: the survey's finding that 17 percent of respondents who were out in school left because of harassment, and the litigation over whether Title IX's ban on sex discrimination covers transgender students. Keisling explains the Obama administration's 2016 "Dear Colleague" letter, its rescission in February 2017 by the new administration, and why she tells families the guidance existed because Title IX protects transgender students and not the reverse. She recounts the story of Gavin Grimm, the Virginia teenager called before a hostile school board who opened with "I'd like to talk to you about separation of church and state," whose case the Supreme Court had just sent back to the Fourth Circuit. The courts, she predicts, will decide the question regardless of who enforces it.

What to Know Now

The decade since this conversation has produced a body of law on every question Keisling raises, and the results are mixed in ways she did not anticipate. Her core legal prediction — that discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination — was adopted by the Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which held six to three that Title VII's ban on sex discrimination in employment covers transgender status. Gavin Grimm prevailed: the Fourth Circuit ruled in 2020 that his school board violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, and the Supreme Court declined review in 2021. On the questions of schools, sports, and medical care, however, the law moved in the other direction. The Title IX regulations issued in 2024 to extend Bostock's reasoning to education were vacated nationwide by a federal court in January 2025. In United States v. Skrmetti (2025), the Court upheld Tennessee's prohibition on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors, applying rational-basis review, and in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox (June 2026) it held that states may limit girls' and women's school sports to biological females, unanimously as to Title IX and six to three as to equal protection, while more than two dozen states enacted such laws. Executive orders issued in January 2025 define sex for federal purposes as biological and binary and direct federal agencies accordingly, prompting litigation over passports, prisons, and schools. The bathroom bills Keisling describes as rare one-offs have become law in roughly a dozen states, largely covering public schools and government buildings, and no court has enjoined them on the reasoning she anticipated. Supporters of these measures describe them as protecting fairness, safety, and parental authority; opponents, including the organization Keisling founded, describe them as discrimination that endangers a vulnerable population, and public opinion, which had broadly favored anti-discrimination protections, has divided sharply on sports and medical care for minors. The National Center for Transgender Equality merged with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund in 2024 to form Advocates for Trans Equality; Keisling stepped down as executive director in 2021 and is now a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, where in 2026 she argued that the movement should consolidate the gains she describes here and reconsider its approach on the issues on which it has lost ground.