Five states sued the Biden administration to overturn its final rule reinterpreting Title IX to include gender identity, seeking to thwart the effort to fold transgender women into the landmark civil-rights law.
There were two lawsuits announced Monday. One was filed by a four-state coalition led by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and joined by the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Mississippi and Montana. The other was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” said the Republican Paxton, who filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality.”
The four-state lawsuit argued that the final rule “drives a dagger through the heart of Title IX’s mandate” to end sex discrimination in education by compelling schools to treat transgender students based on their gender identity.
That means requiring schools to use different-sex pronouns for students and staff; opening female restrooms and locker rooms to transgender girls, and potentially including transgender girls in girls’ rooms on overnight field trips, the lawsuit said.
“If the Final Rule stands, it will gut the very essence of Title IX and destroy decades of advances in equal educational opportunities, especially for women and girls,” said Ms. Murrill on X. “Forcing a young girl to change clothes in front of a boy or man in a locker room is entirely antithetical to the dignity and respect that Title IX was intended to preserve and advance.”
A host of conservative groups and red-state officials vowed to challenge the Title IX update after it was published April 19 in what the Education Department billed as a “clarification” of the 1972 Title IX law.
“For 50 years Title IX has protected girls and women’s rights, but President Biden has abandoned those protections to appease the woke left,” Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said. “This rule is not based in scientific reality. It redefines biological sex which will allow men to compete in women’s sports, violate women’s privacy, and put women and girls in dangerous situations on campus.”
BREAKING: The first lawsuit against the Department of Education’s Illegal #TitleIX rule has just dropped and it’s a doozy.
— Sarah Parshall Perry (@SarahPPerry) April 29, 2024
“[The Rule] is a naked attempt to strongarm our schools into molding our children…in the government’s preferred image of how a child should think, act,… pic.twitter.com/uWqVukBRva
The department stressed that the “final regulations do not include new rules governing eligibility criteria for athletic teams,” citing a separate rule making on transgender athletes that is expected to be released after the November presidential election.
The attorneys general dismissed the department’s effort to separate the two, saying that the newly released regulations will inevitably require schools to allow transgender athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
“Moreover, although the Department tries to downplay the Rule’s impact on athletics — because the Department knows that extending its radical theory to athletics would be political suicide in an election year — the Rule cannot help but sound the death knell for female sports,” the four-state lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division.
/1NEW LAWSUIT — Partnering with @TXAG @KenPaxtonTX we filed a lawsuit to stop Biden’s Title IX Rules.
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) April 29, 2024
Biden’s new rules eradicate protections for women nationwide, forcing minor girls to share restrooms with men and pretend men are women. No public school is exempt.
Read on: pic.twitter.com/UkJ9CHQP4s
A department spokesperson declined Monday to comment on the pending litigation but defended the final rule, saying it was intended “to give complete effect to the Title IX statutory guarantee that no person experiences sex discrimination in federally funded education.”
“As a condition of receiving federal funds, all federally funded schools are obligated to comply with these final regulations and we look forward to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience,” the spokesperson said.
The department said that the rules would not end Title IX’s exception for sex-segregated campus housing, but would “clarify that a school must not separate or treat people differently based on sex in a manner that subjects them to more than de minimis harm.”
“The final regulations further recognize that preventing someone from participating in school (including in sex-separate activities) consistent with their gender identity causes that person more than de minimis harm,” said the department in its April 19 fact sheet.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch warned that “school officials should be careful about requesting documentation to verify the sincerity of a person’s claimed gender identity, the Department ominously warns, because that itself might violate the Final Rule.”
The final rule, which drew a record 240,000 comments, is scheduled to take effect Aug. 1.
The regulations also loosen the Trump administration’s due-process protections on the handling of campus sexual-misconduct claims by, for example, returning to the single-investigator model and removing requirements for live hearings and cross-examination by defendants.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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