“Today I am here because I want every trans kid in Oregon to know that they have rights."

Pictured above: Tyler Warner, 16.

It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive between Sutherlin, Oregon, and Portland. Although the trip is a mostly straight shot up Interstate 5, with the occasional scenic detour around the Cascade Range, the distance encompasses more than half the length of the entire state. If you were to take the route far enough, you’d end up in Canada in one direction and Mexico the other.

Suffice it to say, anyone willing to make a trek that’s five hours round-trip must really want to go. That’s precisely what Tyler Warner, 16, and his mother, Mandy, did on July 11, when Tyler spoke in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

That day, the Ninth Circuit heard an appeal from a group calling itself Parents for Privacy, asking the court to reconsider the decision by Judge Marco A. Hernandez to toss out a complaint the group filed against the Dallas School District. Parents for Privacy argue the Dallas, Oregon, district violated the rights of cisgender students by allowing their transgender classmates to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.

“The issues on appeal all turn on whether persons of the opposite sex may invade privacy areas traditionally reserved for a single sex,’’ claim the group’s attorneys, Ryan Adams and Herbert G. Grey.

ACLU of Oregon

But all Tyler wants to do is be treated like any other boy. While he is not a student in the Dallas School District and is not a party to the lawsuit, he was targeted in a nearly identical complaint against Sutherlin School District, a town of 8,000 located just outside Salem, that was eventually dropped last year. He wants to make sure that no other transgender student has to face what he went through.

“Today I am here because I want every trans kid in Oregon to know that they have rights,” he told the crowd gathered outside the courtroom. “Everyone deserves a safe and inclusive learning environment.”

While Parents for Privacy claims that sharing the bathroom with their trans peers forces cisgender students to experience “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, intimidation, fear, apprehension, and stress,” Tyler knows it’s much worse for transgender youth who stand to be excluded and ostracized as a result of such litigation. When a student at his high school filed a lawsuit against Tyler for using the boys’ bathroom, he didn’t find out until his name was printed in a local paper.

Tyler still remembers the day in July 2017 when his mother called him out of his bedroom to show him the headline: “Sutherlin student files lawsuit over transgender bathroom use.”

“It really came out of nowhere for me personally, and school was going to happen again in a few months after I had found out,” Tyler tells NewNowNext, noting that the article was published while he was still on summer break. “I was really scared how that was going to go.”

“As a mom, I was irate,” Mandy adds. “Nobody felt the need to inform Tyler that he was actually named.”

ACLU of Oregon

In addition to being effectively outed to his entire school district, what bothered Tyler about the lawsuit is that the student (referred to only as “T.B.” in the complaint) never even spoke to him. When he went to the bathroom during fourth period on January 31, he heard a group of students whispering outside the stall. “Isn’t it weird?” they murmured to themselves. Tyler never got the chance to see who the boys were, however, because the students left before he could finish.

Tyler was pulled into the vice principal’s office the very same day. “At 11:06, you went into the boys’ bathroom,” he asked, showing security camera footage of Tyler entering the facility. “Why didn’t you go to the girls’ bathroom?”

Not only had Tyler been using the boys’ bathroom without incident for months, he and his mother (who met with the vice principal later the same day) asserted that it was Tyler’s right to use the restroom which aligns most closely with his gender identity. In 2016, the Oregon Department of Education issued guidelines instructing faculty and staff in K-12 schools to “accept a student’s assertion of his/her/their own gender identity” in regards to restroom use, pronouns, and participation in athletics.

“A student who says she is a girl and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day should be respected and treated like any other girl,” reads the 16-page memorandum, which was fairly identical to a “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Obama administration the same month.

“I reaffirmed that Tyler is a male and will use the male’s restroom,” Mandy says. “The other boys can use the single stalls if they’re uncomfortable with it.”

While the Obama-era guidelines instructing schools to treat students in accordance with their gender identity were rescinded by the Department of Education under Betsy Devos, the state’s policies didn’t change. Eventually, “T.B.” dropped the lawsuit after the Ninth Circuit dismissed the case against Dallas School District last year, which complainants with Parents for Privacy are now seeking to overturn.

“[High] school students do not have a fundamental privacy right to not share school restrooms, lockers, and showers with transgender students whose biological sex is different than theirs,” Hernandez wrote at the time.

ACLU of Oregon

The ACLU of Oregon, one of the advocacy groups lobbying on behalf of trans students, believes the Ninth Circuit will again rule on the right side of history. Its communications director, Sarah Armstrong, cited a favorable verdict in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where judges ruled in June 2018 that a Pennsylvania school district’s trans-affirming policies do not violate the 14th Amendment right to privacy or civil rights laws barring sex-based discrimination.

“The courts have understood that transgender students just using restrooms and locker rooms like everyone else doesn’t violate anyone’s right,” Armstong tells NewNowNext. “Instead it would violate trans students’ rights to keep them out of the facilities their peers use just because they are transgender.”

While the Ninth Circuit weighs the appeal, Tyler and his mother will keep racking up miles on the odometer until all trans students in the state are treated with dignity and respect. Earlier this year, he got a chance to march with his girlfriend at the front of Douglas County’s first-ever LGBTQ Pride parade, which attracted a crowd of a few hundred people. The couple held a banner reading: “More Pride, Less Fear.”

As he has gotten accustomed to doing over the past year, Tyler also got a chance to tell his story to those who came out to the event. While he was nervous about how the news coverage would impact life in a small town, the more he talks, the more people listen.

“I didn’t really know how to have a voice before,” Tyler says. “I just didn’t really know how to get myself out there.”

Even though he was initially bullied my his classmates when he came out as transgender, his mother adds that Tyler’s school in Sutherlin has been supportive after the lawsuit was filed last year. Other LGBTQ classmates, she says, have even come to him for advice about coming out to their families.

“It takes a little bit of the stress off and the worry to see that he does have so much support, and that there are that many people around [who] are willing to step out and say, ‘Hey, this is who I am,’ and hold each other up,” Mandy says. “On the other hand, it makes me really worry about the kids that don’t have this kind of support. … That’s what I worry about now.”