Federal Judge Blocks Biden Title IX Guidance Redefining Sex Discrimination For LGBT Agenda
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor blocked a Biden administration guidance on forcing widespread recognition and accommodation of LGBT ideology on public education by redefining federal nondiscrimination language, siding with Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal challenge to the rule change.
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) under President Joe Biden issued a guidance to educators that its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) interprets Title IX, the longstanding set of rules against sex discrimination in public education, to also cover “sexual orientation and gender identity,” and will “fully enforce” this interpretation “in education programs and activities that receive Federal financial assistance from the Department.”
In February, the DOE submitted to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget a finalized Title IX rule, later published in April, that expands the federal government’s prohibition against “discrimination” to now include under its umbrella “discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.” Critics have warned it has broad ramifications for sex-specific restrooms, lockers, and athletic programs, speech and conscience rights, and more.
Several states, including Texas, sued the administration over the matter, and now O’Connor has ruled that with its 2021 guidance the DOE “engaged in unlawful agency action taken in excess of (its) authority, while failing to adhere to the appropriate notice and comments requirements when doing so,” going beyond a reminder of educators’ existing legal duties into “impos(ing) new duties” that could not be legitimately imposed without going through a proper regulatory review process.
“If Congress cannot yet decide whether or not it wants to expand Title IX’s reach, there is zero reason to believe the Department may do so,” O’Connor wrote. He found that the guidance would “functionally rewrite” Title IX and “shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress,” which is “not how our democratic system functions.”
While not directly addressing the new formal rule, the decision is expected to bolster the legal case against it as well, leading Paxton to hail it as a “major victory.”
“Joe Biden’s unlawful effort to weaponize Title IX for his extremist agenda has been stopped in its tracks,” Paxton said. “Threatening to withhold education funding by forcing states to accept ‘transgender’ policies that put women in danger was plainly illegal. Texas has prevailed on behalf of the entire Nation.”
The Biden administration’s rationale flies in the face of both the plain statutory meaning of “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the clear legislative intent of the lawmakers who drafted and passed it, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) senior counsel John Bursch argued. “There is little dispute that, in 1964, the term ‘sex’ was publicly understood, as it is now, to mean biological sex: male and female. After all, the term ‘gender identity’ wasn’t even part of the American lexicon at the time. Its first use was at a European medical conference in 1963. And no semblance of it appeared in federal law until 1990.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students.
Despite evidence that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms to impressionable young people, including from the Biden administration’s own Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Biden administration has given uncompromising support to all major aspects of the LGBT movement, including reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding White House events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage transitions as “close to sinful,” promoting underage transitions (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.
