Texas judges block Biden protections for LGBTQ students

Two conservative federal judges in Texas blocked the president Joe Biden administration from imposing new anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students, blocking the rule from taking effect in the Republican-led state and in a school district represented by a Christian legal rights group.

Thursday’s rulings by U.S. District Judges Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo and Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth followed rulings by three other Republican-appointed judges in Kansas, Kentucky It is Louisiana blocking regulation in 14 other states.

The US Department of Education rule interprets the prohibition of discrimination “on the basis of sex” contained in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 as also a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Department of Education cited a 2020 US Supreme Court rulingBostock v. Clayton County, holding that the prohibition on workplace sex discrimination contained in a different law, Title VII, covered gay and transgender workers.

Courts often rely on interpretations of Title VII when analyzing Title IX, since both laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.

But Kacsmaryk, appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump, to stay by the side Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and two professors at the University of Texas at Austin concluded that Title VII does not govern Title IX.

He said a strict reading of Title IX’s text makes clear that its overall goal was to prevent discrimination against women in public and higher education, but the rule would force Texas schools to no longer separate bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities based on in biological sex.

“Title IX protects women in spaces that have historically been reserved for men,” he wrote. “In stark contrast, the Final Rule places men in the same Title IX spaces statutorily reserved for women.”

He issued an injunction preventing the rule from being applied in Texas. Paxton, on social media platform X, hailed the decision for stopping the Department of Education from “forcing radical ‘transgender’ ideology into Texas schools.”

In a separate ruling, issued almost simultaneously, O’Connor, appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, blocked the rule from being enforced at 11 schools located in the Carroll Independent School District in Texas.

“The Final Rule undermines more than fifty years of progress for women and girls made possible by Title IX,” O’Connor wrote. “Worse still, the Final Rule endangers not just women and girls, but all students.”

District attorneys from the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom urged O’Connor to go even further and suspend the rule’s Aug. 1 effective date, a solution the judge said would potentially have to be applied across the board. country.

O’Connor, who had previously stated related guidance from the department invalidpostponed the decision on this issue and requested more information until July 18 about how a stay would work in this context.

The Department of Education, in a statement, defended the law as being designed “to realize the legal guarantee of Title IX.”

The cases in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas are State of Texas v. United States, No. 2:24-cv-00086, and Carroll Independent School District v U.S. Department of Education, No. -00461.