A DISAGREEMENT about the treatment of transgender students is pitting the largest high-school district in Illinois against federal authorities. The bone of contention is the access to changing rooms for a transgender high-school student in one of the five high schools and two alternative schools of Township High School District 211 in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. The student, who was born male but identifies as female, lived for several years as a girl and plays on the girls' sports team, demands that she is given full access to the girls' locker room. Daniel Cates, the superintendent of district 211, denies her full access to that and instead offers her a separate room or the male locker room to change in. He argues that he has to balance the privacy rights of 12,500 students and the rights of a group with particular needs. In his view, the privacy of that vast majority of students is infringed if transgender students are allowed to change in the same locker room as the students of the gender they identify with.

The controversy began in 2014 when the student’s family, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education. The ACLU alleges that Mr Cates’s stance was blatant discrimination. It violated Title IX, an amendment of the Higher Education Act, which says that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance”.

School district 211 officials and members of the board of education worked for months in the hope of finding a compromise. The proposed solution requires the transgender student to change and shower in private. District 211 also advertised how supportive of transgender students it is in other ways. They can list their self-identified gender and preferred name on school records as well as play on the sports team of the gender with which they identify and use the bathroom of that gender.

“I applaud the school district for trying to come to an accommodation,” says Mara Keisling, the founder and executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Even so, she argues that the transgender student should be treated exactly like the other girls and be allowed to change with them in a communal locker room if she wishes to. “It is clear that the school district doesn’t buy that she is a girl,” says Ms Keisling.

The Department of Education wants all schools to treat transgender students as they do others, which is why school district 211 risks losing $6m in federal funding and paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if it continues to insist on its stand. Losing federal funds would be a big blow at a time when Illinois is beyond broke and the state’s new Republican governor is cutting public expenditure wherever he can.

Meanwhile, hundreds of school districts are following the Department of Education’s rules without it causing them much trouble. A few objected to the rules and ran into trouble. On October 28th the Obama administration filed a legal brief in a federal appeals court backing a transgender student’s challenge of his school’s policy banning him from using the bathroom that corresponds with the gender he identifies with. Gavin Grimm, who was born female but identifies as male, sued his school in rural Virginia over a policy requiring him to use the girls’ restroom or a single-stall unisex bathroom. Some of his class mates and their parents reportedly argued that his presence in the boys’ bathroom would be disruptive and violate the male students’ privacy.

It takes courage to come out as transgender and possibly even more courage to sue a high school. The Obama administration is more supportive of the rights of transgender people than any previous administration. Much more needs to be done to end the discrimination and harassment of America’s transgender population, which is small, at around 1% of the population, but growing as more young people feel emboldened to come out.