Tipsheet

Obama-Appointed Activist Judge Dismisses Title IX Lawsuit Against Illinois School District

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  July 20, 2026 9:30 AM

Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, the Obama-appointed activist judge who once ruled that illegal aliens have Second Amendment rights, has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a student in the Valley View Community Unit School District (VVCUSD) against the district, claiming that allowing male students to use female spaces was a violation of Title IX and equal protection.

Judge Coleman basically said there were no Title IX or equal protection clause violations, something Ian Prior, Senior Counsel at America First Legal, called a 'textbook' bad legal take.

Prior's thread continues.

"The Court, despite this being a 12(b)(6) motion, claimed that the Plaintiff's alleged description of the male as a male was a 'conclusory factual allegation' based on discriminatory gender stereotypes," Prior wrote. "Apparently, the Court was unaware that the Supreme Court of the United States held recently in Trump v. Orr that one's biological sex is a "historical fact."

Let's parse that out. The girl rightly pointed out that the boy in her restroom is, in fact, a biological male and Judge Coleman said that was a 'discriminatory gender stereotype.'

Realize what we're dealing with here.

Prior continued, "In other words, the male's subjective claim of a female gender identity trumps the biological sex of the female plaintiff."

Boys win, girls lose. Every single time.

Here's where Judge Coleman's ruling gets even more ridiculous.

"In dismissing the equal protection claim, the Court amazingly relied on Skrmetti. It claimed that because the policy requires both males and females to subordinate their rights to bodily privacy and integrity to members of the opposite sex, there is no equal protection violation," Prior wrote. "In doing so, the Court misreads Skrmetti and misapplies equal protection precedent, improperly turning the equal protection clause into the equal discrimination clause."

Oh, so because a mentally ill girl could, in theory, say she's a boy and use a boys' restroom, this is not a violation of equal protection.

"But the Supreme Court also made clear that where a classification is not based on a protected category, but turns on it, heightened scrutiny is appropriate," Prior noted. "The Supreme Court cited Loving v. Virginia as an example. The law at issue in that case prohibited anyone from marrying a member of a different race. It thus treated all races equally. However, because the law's application necessarily depended on consideration of race, it triggered heightened scrutiny. In other words, the Supreme Court recognizes what Judge Coleman does not: IT’S THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE NOT THE EQUAL DISCRIMINATION CLAUSE."

"Specifically, students who demand to be treated as the opposite sex in their use of sex-segregated facilities are given preferential status for those facilities over those of the sex for which those facilities are designated," Prior added. "The application of the policy obviously depends on considerations of sex and should trigger intermediate scrutiny, requiring the school to show that its policy is substantially related to an important government interest. Whether the school can meet its burden cannot be resolved at the 12(b)(6) phase."

"Clearly, there is a discriminatory impact," Prior wrote. "Females must subordinate their rights to males who claim to be females and vice versa. And if the discriminatory purpose is not clear from the face of the policy itself, it is certainly foreseeable that females or males would become second-class citizens in their own restrooms/locker rooms/changing rooms. That raises an inference of discriminatory purpose sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss and to shift the burden to the school under intermediate scrutiny."

Prior then raised a good point. "The policy can also be framed as discriminating in favor of supposed transgender students over non-transgender students," he wrote. "The former can use facilities of their biological sex, their claimed sex, or a private facility. The latter cannot use opposite sex facilities, but are limited to facilities of their own sex, and, when they feel uncomfortable with a male claiming to be transgender using that facility, they are told to use a private restroom. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services that discrimination in favor of someone who identifies as LGBT is equally repugnant under the law as discriminating against someone who identifies as LGBT. To the extent that the response is that barring someone claiming to be transgender from a bathroom of the self-claimed sex is discrimination, I would point to Title IX itself, which clearly is not unconstitutional and allows facilities to be segregated based on biological sex, as detailed in the next several posts."

Prior also said that Judge Coleman's ruling employed 'contradictory logic' in regard to the Title IX claim.

"On the other hand, the Court claims that separating facilities on the basis of sex would subject the school to liability under Title IX. This makes no sense," Prior noted.

"The Supreme Court very clearly stated that 'sex,' as used in Title IX, the Javits Amendment, and the 1975 Regulations, could not plausibly mean anything but biological sex. It then applied that analysis to the sports context.But those same Title IX regulations explicitly permit restrooms and locker rooms to be segregated based on sex. It makes zero sense to read the term "sex" as used in Title IX and its regulations cannot plausibly mean anything but biological sex only in the context of sports, while having a different meaning is the same regulations when applied to restrooms and locker rooms," Prior wrote. "So it appears that the Court is just ignoring West Virginia v. BPJ and still defining sex to include gender identity."

"In any event, the Court is correct in that Title IX does not explicitly require schools to maintain sex-segregated facilities. But the practical and legal reality is that once a school chooses to offer students the educational benefit of a sex segregated facility to protect their bodily privacy and integrity, that school cannot then administer those facilities in a manner that discriminates on the basis of sex under Title IX. That is exactly what the school did here. The Plaintiff used a restroom that was clearly designated for females like her, as the Court acknowledges," Prior continued. "Yet, the school then lets certain males use that restroom and invade the privacy of females, the protection of which was the very justification to create a female-only bathroom in the first place and the reason why Title IX permits such accommodations."

Prior also pointed out that Judge Coleman's ruling missed a consequence.

"If separating facilities in recognition of privacy needs due to the enduring physical differences between males and females is no longer important (despite the Supreme Court's suggestion to the contrary in U.S. v. Virginia), that would mean that the school's default practice of generally segregating facilities based on sex no longer has a justification sufficient to pass intermediate scrutiny and is itself an equal protection violation," he wrote. "This only further reinforces the point - if you segregate facilities based on sex, you must keep them segregated based on sex. Otherwise, the entire policy will drown in a flood of unconstitutionality."

But as he pointed out, perhaps the court doesn't care.

An appeal will probably happen and this will probably go to SCOTUS again.

Girls should not have to fight this hard for privacy and single-sex spaces, but it's clear the Left is not going to stop pushing this transgender nonsense on us.