The Federal Government has filed a friend of the court brief in a Virginia case where a boy who thinks he is a girl wants to use the girl’s bathroom.

A Virginia boy is suing the Gloucester Country School Board because of a policy that requires boys to use the boy’s room or a unisex bathroom. Sixteen-year-old Gavin Grimm says this violates his rights under a 1972 federal law banning sex discrimination in education.

The government says the board policy denies Grimm “a benefit that every other student at this school enjoys: access to restrooms that are consistent with his or her gender identity. Treating a student differently from other students because of his birth-assigned sex diverges from his gender identity constitutes differential treatment on the basis of sex under Title IX.”

A story on this fight published by ABC News refers to this bathroom battle as “a modern civil rights issue that has roiled some communities as more children identify as transgender at younger ages.”

The gay Human Rights Campaign issued a statement that the brief “”sends a crucial message to schools across the country — transgender youth are valuable members of our community who are entitled to full protection of the law.”

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has pressured school boards around the country and such threats are generally enough to cause relatively poor school districts to knuckle under to the demand.

Studies show that those who think they are in the wrong body suffer from high rates of psychological problems and commit suicide at substantially higher rates than the general population. Those who actually go through with having their genitals altered to resemble the opposite sex have suicide rates even higher.