Updated: 6/24/2013, 3:15 p.m. MDT
DENVER — Colorado officials say a suburban Colorado Springs school district discriminated against a 6-year-old transgender girl by preventing her from using the girls’ bathroom, in what advocates described as the first such ruling in the next frontier in civil rights.
Coy Mathis’s family raised the issue after school officials at Eagleside Elementary in Fountain said the first-grader could use restrooms in either the teachers’ lounge or in the nurse’s office, but not the girls’ bathroom. Coy’s parents feared she would be stigmatized and bullied.
On Monday, the Mathis family and its lawyers celebrated the ruling on the steps of the state capitol. Coy, dressed in a glittering tank top, jeans and pink canvas sneakers, ran around a towering blue spruce tree as her mother spoke to reporters.
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“Her future will be better if we get to this place where this is nothing to be ashamed of,” Kathryn Mathis said, noting the family hadn’t sought a civil rights battle but was happy for the Colorado Division of Civil Rights’ ruling.
As the gay rights movement has won mounting legal and electoral victories in recent years, advocates hope the latest decision will lend momentum to the struggles of transgender people.
“This is by far the high-water mark for cases dealing with the rights of transgender people to access bathrooms,” said the Mathis family’s attorney, Michael Silverman of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. He and other advocates said the case is one of several potentially ground-breaking transgender civil-rights cases winding their way through the nation’s courts.
Coy was born a triplet with two sisters and identified as a girl before she began attending elementary school in Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8, an area heavy with military personnel near an Army base. Her father, Jeremy, is an ex-Marine.
At 5 months, she took a pink blanket meant for her sister Lily. Later, she showed little interest in toy cars and boy clothes with pictures of sports, monsters and dinosaurs on them. She refused to leave the house if she had to wear boy clothes. After her parents accepted her identity, they said, Coy come out of her shell.
Coy was diagnosed with “gender identity disorder” – a designation the American Psychiatric Association removed last year from its list of mental ailments. The removal reflected the growing medical consensus that identification as another gender cannot be changed.
The Mathises said they feared the district’s decision would stigmatize Coy, who was reduced to tears when her teacher briefly put her in the boys’ line. When she came home, according to legal records, she cried to her parents: “Not even my teachers know I’m a girl!” When Coy rose to first grade, the district forbade her from using the girls’ restroom.
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Since they filed their complaint, the Mathises have moved to the Denver suburb of Aurora because of health problems suffered by another daughter. They said they hope the ruling will make it easier for Coy to start at a new school.
Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8 declined to discuss the case Monday. The district, however, can seek arbitration or a public trial, said Cory Everett-Lozano, a spokeswoman with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
Silverman said transgender civil rights are largely where gay rights were in the 1980s. He said progress in gay rights has made it easier for transgender people to dare to fight in court.
Coy, he said, is such an example. Her parents grew up during a more tolerant era for sexual rights and recognized that they should not try to force her to be a boy. “That has allowed children like Coy to make their voices heard,” Silverman said.
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