Like many teens, it took some time to find the thing I really loved to do. A few years ago, I discovered my love for cross-country running. I loved running so much that I got out of bed to train before the sun rose — a feat my parents described as miraculous. During my freshman year, I set a personal record of a 5:51-minute mile. At the time, it seemed like things could only get better.

Unfortunately, when I returned for my sophomore year at Spring Woods High School, everything changed. We had a new head coach, which came with some concerning changes. I noticed differences in how the girls’ cross-country team was coached and trained as compared to the boys’ team.

For example, I noticed that the boys’ cross-country runners were prioritized in practices and at meets, even though our head coach was hired to train all of us. The boys’ team was assigned longer runs than the girls’ team, and the coaches would often end our practices as soon as the boys’ team finished their run, even if that meant the girls could not finish theirs. Also, a coach would often bike alongside the boys as they ran, giving encouragement and shouting out split times so they knew their pacing. Without encouragement from our coaches, the girls did neighborhood runs alone.

It would have been bad enough if the girls were only being coached unequally as compared to the boys. But the coaches also subjected us to a double standard regarding the dress code.

As cross-country runners, we run during the summer when the sun is constantly shining, and the Texas heat averages above 90 degrees, often reaching 100 degrees. Given these conditions, boys and girls commonly take off their shirts to run to prevent heat exhaustion. This had never been a problem until my sophomore year, when girls were forbidden from running in their sports bras.

To justify this change, our parents were told that the head coach did not want to see any “butts, boobs, or bellies.” To me, this signaled that girls’ bodies were seen as inappropriate merely for existing. Although female athletes at every level of competition commonly wear sports bras to practices and meets, and sports bras are the official uniform of the U.S. Women’s Track and Field Team, a group of girl athletes practicing in sports bras to get some relief from the Texas summer heat was unacceptable.

After this rule was put into place, I saw a boy running shirtless during practice. Seeing that he was not reprimanded, I took my shirt off because I was hot and we were doing a hill run workout. Immediately, the coaches yelled at me to put my shirt back on. When I pointed out that they had no issue with the boy running shirtless, the coaches asked the boy to put his shirt back on.

I learned from my parents to never be afraid to speak up about unfair treatment. As these events unfolded, I asked many questions about the sexist sports bra rule and how the girls’ cross-country team was being treated unequally. Instead of treating us fairly and taking my questions seriously, as I thought they would, I was kicked out of practice.

During future practices, I was mistreated and isolated by my coaches. For example, if I asked for an instruction to be repeated, I was ignored. I was even passed over for an athletic award when I was the top runner on the girls’ cross-country team and had the best attendance record of all students. Missing out on that award showed me that not only did my coaches not value my hard work and accomplishments, but they also did not believe in me.

Being unfairly cast aside by my coaches hurt — a lot. I often wondered if I would have been treated this way if I wasn’t a girl of color who spoke up on behalf of herself and her teammates. My love for running dimmed, and I lost that motivation to get up in the morning and run to reach my personal best.

This spring, the ACLU and the ACLU of Texas sent an advocacy letter on my behalf to the Spring Branch Independent School District to call out these unfair policies and practices. I am excited to share that this summer, the District hired a new cross-country head coach who has prioritized coaching all runners equally. Running on the cross-country team this season has been an awesome way to wrap up my high school athletic career.

Spring Branch ISD OCR Complaint

Despite this progress, the District’s sexist dress code policies, including the sports bra rule, remain in effect. The District has yet to acknowledge the harm its policies have caused or to meet with the ACLU and the ACLU of Texas about concrete changes it can make to treat all students fairly, regardless of their gender.

Although the District may be willing to stay silent when it is called to action, I am not. That is why today we filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Change only happens when we demand it.

In the span of just a few years, transgender people have had their rights and lives radically reshaped by a litany of political attacks against our freedom, our dignity, and the health care many of us need to live. As part of a coordinated national effort to erode legal protections for trans people and push us out of public life, a wave of bills targeting gender-affirming health care for transgender people have effectively banned it for nearly one-third of transgender youth in the United States. These laws uproot entire families and communities, alarm doctors and medical experts, and endanger the very young people they laws claim to protect.

While the ACLU and our nationwide affiliates succeeded in the trial courts when the judges actually considered the facts, these early wins have increasingly been overturned, allowing these devastating bans to take effect. This includes the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, where a three-judge panel overturned a lower court decision, which had blocked Tennessee’s ban. As a result of the Sixth Circuit decision, health care bans have gone into effect in Tennessee and Kentucky.

In each of these challenges, we are committed to exhausting every option we have with the goal of protecting the ability of our community to access this care for as long as possible. That’s why, today, we’ve asked the United States Supreme Court to review the lower court’s ruling and block these dangerous laws from further threatening transgender youth, destabilizing their families, and needlessly tying the hands of their medical providers.

How We’re Winning The Fight to Defend Trans Rights

In states across the country, judges are blocking bans on gender-affirming care and drag performances.

In this case, we have the honor of representing LW, a 15-year-old transgender girl, and her mother Samantha Williams. Like nearly 100,000 families with transgender kids ages 13 to 17 who now live in a state that has banned their health care, LW and her parents face the risk of either being denied the care they and their doctor know is right for their daughter or leaving the only home LW has known. Tennessee’s ban — like the nearly identical laws passed in 20 other state legislatures in the last three years — directly targets LW because she is transgender.

At the core of our argument before the court are two basic constitutional claims. First, Tennessee’s law bans treatment only when that treatment is provided to transgender youth like LW who have gender dysphoria. This targeted restriction discriminates based on both sex and the fact that a person is transgender and violates the Equal Protection Clause.

Second, Tennessee’s law interferes with the ability of parents like Samantha to make medical decisions for their minor children even though their children and doctors all agree the treatment is necessary. The law substitutes the state’s judgment for that of loving parents who are following the guidance of their children and the advice of doctors. The Supreme Court has long recognized that parents have certain fundamental rights concerning the care and custody of their minor children. While the rights of parents are importantly not absolute — and transgender youth have rights all their own — Tennessee’s law forces a one-fits-all approach to treatment that overrides the informed judgment of parents, adolescents, and doctors. Tennessee’s law forces parents like Samantha to “co-parent” with their state legislature. It is particularly pernicious when that legislative body has made it clear they have no interest in learning the truth about this medical care and young people like LW.

Asking the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision is always something we take seriously. We have witnessed this court disregard and infringe people’s bodily autonomy repeatedly, most recently with its devastating decision in Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade. We take this step with full knowledge that, no matter what happens, we will have to fight for each other and use every tool in our toolbox to defend all our rights to bodily autonomy. With such critical, life-or-death health care on the line, we must continue to fight back against Tennessee’s law and exhaust every option available to us. No matter what happens, we will continue to fight thoughtfully and creatively to ensure that everyone can access the health care they need.

The last few months have been the most personally and professionally devastating of my life. My heart — and the heart of every transgender advocate fighting this fight — is heavy with the weight of the dehumanization and needless harm trans people like us are experiencing nationwide. But I also know that every out trans person has embraced the unknown in the name of living free from shame or the vice of other people’s expectations. By virtue of being a living, breathing trans person, each of us has chosen hope over despair. Regardless of any court, we will always exist in joyful defiance of efforts to limit who we are and who we can be.

A movement is underway to create a digital identity system that would allow people to carry their ID on their phones or on digital smart cards and, eventually, use them over the internet. That might sound handy at first blush, but as we discussed in this 2021 report, it would not be as simple as it might sound. It could create a world where we get asked for digital ID at every turn, and by every web site, and where our ID use is tracked; and it could have significant implications for equity if digital IDs become effectively mandatory by disadvantaging those who don’t have a smartphone.

Unfortunately, the TSA is threatening to prematurely lock in a harmful digital identity system that allows ID card issuers to track where people show their ID, fails to include a number of important privacy protections, and fails to ensure that the system is free from the control of particular private corporations. We, along with several of our allies, submitted joint comments to the agency highlighting these and other problems and urging the agency to slow down.

Identity Crisis: What Digital Driver’s Licenses Could Mean for Privacy, Equity, and Freedom

The major questions about any digital identity system are whether it will be designed to protect privacy to the maximum extent possible, and whether people will be forced to participate in it. Will it be built to give control to people, or built to spy on people and increase the control of government agencies and companies over people? Making somebody show ID is sometimes necessary, but it’s also an act of power. Who should be able to require someone else to identify themselves? What can the requestor do with that information once they have it? What recourse does the identified person have if the requestor misuses the information?

We need to be extremely careful about what kind of system we adopt, because it’s going to need to be interoperable across all the states, and potentially across the world, and therefore, once adopted, is going to be very difficult to change.

The TSA relies on identity cards only for one very narrow and specific purpose, so it might seem strange that the agency is in a position to determine the design of a new identity system, dictating the process for how people present ID in every small town and city across America — and more significantly, perhaps, online — for decades to come. Some in Congress have proposed the creation of a national expert task force to recommend a digital ID architecture, but that hasn’t happened.

New Mobile Phone Service Shows We Can Have Both Privacy and Nice Things

Despite the desires of companies to monetize our data, we must insist that privacy be built into the technologies we depend on.

The reason for the TSA’s position is the Real ID Act of 2005, in which Congress forced states to follow federal standards for the design of physical driver’s licenses that would be recognized by the federal government. (This ill-conceived legislation was drafted hastily and forced through Congress without hearings in a post-9/11 environment where opposition to even the stupidest national security measures was still demagogued as “pro-terrorist.”) In 2020, Congress modified that law by extending federal power to digital IDs, leaving it up to DHS to craft the precise rules for what kinds of digital ID would be deemed Real ID-compliant. DHS then decided to delegate that process to its sub-agency, the TSA.

In short, whatever rules the TSA comes up with for federally compliant digital IDs will force the states to comply and are likely to govern what the nation ends up with.

A lot of innovation is underway in the digital ID space. A whole community of technologists and other experts has been working on the problems of online identification and authorization for years. There’s innovation in privacy-protecting encryption with a wide variety of applications. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main standards organization for the web, is working on a standard called Verifiable Credentials, which is more decentralized and privacy-protecting than many other systems.

Another standard that has been issued is called Mobile Driver’s Licenses (mDLs). This standard was created behind closed doors by a secretive committee at the International Standards Organization (ISO) that, so far as I can tell, was made up of representatives of U.S. security agencies like DHS, tech giants, and authoritarian governments. As discussed in our 2021 report, this ISO standard is flawed. It would allow for IDs that “phone home” to the DMV (or its corporate contractor), allowing tracking of where, when, and to whom you are showing your ID, and still lacks many important components that could protect privacy. Missing components include, for example, standards governing the design of digital wallets and their privacy protections, protections for data stored on the phone, mechanisms for the ID holder to receive information about the legitimacy of the requester, and provisioning (the process states use to install an mDL in people’s wallets).

If the United States is to adopt a digital ID, it’s also vital that that ID be open and free of proprietary corporate strings. There must be no one corporation, or small handful of corporations, that Americans are de facto required to deal with in order to participate in a digital identity system. Yet the TSA appears to be working extremely closely with Apple Inc. Documents obtained by journalist Jason Mikula reveal that the TSA has entered into contracts that appear to give Apple Inc. significant power over the implementation of mDL checkpoints. For puzzling and unclear reasons, the TSA even signed over to Apple the agency’s patents governing the operation of its airport mDL checkpoints.

If it moves to embrace the ISO standard at this time, as it is proposing to do, the TSA will prematurely lock in that standard before we have a clear sense of its effectiveness or risks, and in spite of the fact that other maturing standards such as Verifiable Credentials seem far superior. Any increased use of digital driver’s licenses won’t speed people through airline security — ID checking is not the bottleneck — and it won’t free people from having to carry their physical ID cards, since, as the TSA warns, “You must still carry your physical ID.” A number of states have launched state digital driver’s license programs (also in questionable partnership with the TSA and Apple), but there has not been any popular rush to embrace them.

And there is no popular clamor for digital IDs from residents of the states. The states that have rolled out digital driver’s licenses have not had substantial public sign-on. This is being driven by vendors and other corporations, eager to define digital driver’s licenses as “the future” and conjure a non-existent public excitement about the technology. Whether or not digital IDs prove to be part of our future, there’s no reason for that future to include this particular form of digital ID.

For all its problems, the TSA doesn’t have any incentive to turn digital IDs into a privacy nightmare. It just wants to check travelers’ IDs (though doing so has a very dubious relationship to the security of aviation). I suspect that it is moving too fast out of a misguided effort to be “mission-focused” and “modern” and to “embrace the future.” But the TSA, like state departments of motor vehicles, has been thrust into an important civic role that is far broader than its mission, and it needs to act with a recognition of that responsibility. As we told the TSA in our comments, there’s no hurry here; if we must have a digital ID system, we should take the time to do it right. A rushed embrace of a poorly scoped standard could leave us locked into a world with even more corporate control, centralized surveillance, and weakened privacy than we have today.