COLUMBIA, S.C. (WRDW/WAGT) - South Carolina now faces a lawsuit stemming from a rule dictating who’s allowed to use which restrooms at school.

The people challenging this law – say they’re now facing “grave violations” of their civil and constitutional rights.

This lawsuit focuses on a temporary law in the current state budget, called a proviso.

During a debate earlier this year over this proviso, senators acknowledged the state was likely to face a lawsuit if they enacted it.

They did – and with the law now in effect, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The lawsuit seeks to block the state and its schools from enforcing the rule.

It requires people, including students, to use school restrooms and locker rooms based on their biological sex at birth.

Schools that violate the law risk losing a quarter of their state funding.

“Stipulates in school settings that a boy will use the boys’ bathroom, the boys’ locker room, the boys’ changing room; a girl will use the girls’ bathroom, the girls’ locker room, the girls’ changing room,” said Sen. Wes Climer, R-York.

The lead plaintiff is a 13-year-old transgender boy enrolled in the Berkeley County School District – which is named as one of the defendants – along with its superintendent, the South Carolina Department of Education, State Superintendent Ellen Weaver, and the State of South Carolina.

The lawsuit refers to the student by the pseudonym “John Doe” – and says he had been using the boys’ restroom at his middle school – and that “No students raised objections.”

But it claims school leaders told Doe that because of this new law -- he would either have to use the girls’ restroom or the single-stall restroom in the nurse’s office – later suspending him and threatening expulsion for using the boys’ restroom as Doe had been before.

The lawsuit says Doe later faced harassment from other students – and moved to online classes.

“They’ve created a space for trans students that’s unsafe, that’s not productive unsafe, that’s not creating an environment where students can just go and learn and be with their friends and be themselves, and that’s not fair,” said Chase Glenn, executive director of the Alliance for Full Acceptance.

The North Charleston-based LGBTQ advocacy organization Alliance for Full Acceptance is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

It comes four years after the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar law in Virginia – in a case the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up.

“When this budget proviso was passed, it was a waste of time, a waste of resources, because this has already been decided. It’s unconstitutional,” Glenn said.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the state has not yet filed its response to this lawsuit in court.

The Berkeley County School District and the South Carolina Department of Education did not respond to our request for comment.