A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a Pennsylvania school district's policy allowing transgender students to use the locker rooms and bathrooms matching their gender identity.

It took about 15 minutes on Thursday for the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia to unanimously reject arguments by the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the six students. They sued the Boyertown Area School District last year, claiming their rights to privacy were being violated due to its trans-inclusive policy.

Circuit Judge Theodore McKee gave the panel, which also includes Judges Patty Shwartz and Richard Lowell Nygaard, just 30 minutes to deliberate, as the school's graduation day is fast approaching. Decisions usually taking weeks or months to come in, making the move quite unusual.

Summarizing the panel's ruling from the bench, McKee said the plaintiffs had failed to prove the policy infringed upon those rights or caused them irreparable harm. The panel also determined they would be unlikely to be successful in a full trial.

“The court is joining a growing consensus of courts that recognize the inclusion and common humanity of transgender students,” said Ria Mar, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania who argued for the district's policy, The Morning Call reports.

"Changing clothes in front of students and classmates of any gender can be uncomfortable," added Mar. "I think, we were all adolescents once and we all get that. But the solution to that is exactly what the school has done here, which is to make private arrangements available to all students, not to banish transgender students and to send a message that who they are is unacceptable."

Aidan DeStefano, a recent Boyertown graduate who is transgender, said he was speechless after hearing the ruling.

He was a senior at the school when it implemented the new policy in 2016.

"Until they step into my body, they have no idea what they’re talking about," he said of the students who objected to that policy, but noted that most of his classmates had been supportive.

“All we’re asking for here is a return to the status quo,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Randall Wenger said repeatedly in court. McKee said an opponent of racially integrated schools could have made that same argument at one time, drawing an audible gasp from some members of the gallery.

“The high school obviously thought there were some real problems that needed addressing,” McKee added.

The Alliance Defending Freedom said it plans to petition the court to rehear their appeal before a larger panel of judges.

The decision follows another ruling this week by a federal court in Virginia that found in favor of transgender student Gavin Grimm in his case against a school district's policy against allowing students to use facilities matching their gender identity.

His case had been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent it back down to the lower courts after the Trump administration rescinded an Obama-era directive to public schools instructing them to honor trans students' right to use those facilities.