Two Republican-appointed judges in Texas blocked enforcement of the Biden administration’s anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students under Title IX last week.
In April, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) unveiled new rules that interpret Title IX’s prohibition on discrimination “on the basis of sex” as including anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. The rules rely on the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that Title VII’s ban on sex-based discrimination in the workplace necessarily covers discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The new Title IX rules are set to go into effect on August 1, just ahead of the upcoming school year.
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But, as NBC News reported, in nearly simultaneous decisions last Thursday, U.S. District Court Judges Matthew Kacsmaryk and Reed O’Connor both blocked the Biden administration rules based on strict interpretations of Title IX as only being intended to protect cisgender women and girls.
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Both judges’ rulings were nakedly transphobic, relying on the anti-trans belief that protections for transgender women and girls pose a threat to the rights of cisgender women and girls.
“Title IX protects women in spaces that were historically reserved to men,” Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, wrote in his decision siding with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and two University of Texas at Austin professors. “In stark contrast, the Final Rule inserts men into the very Title IX spaces statutorily reserved to women.”
Kacsmaryk wrote that lawyers for the DOE had not adequately explained how the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Title VII’s workplace protections in Bostock applies to Title IX, which, he wrote, “implicates women’s athletics, safety, and sex-specific facilities in a different setting: schools, colleges, and universities.”
Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary injunction preventing the DOE from enforcing the rules in Texas.
Similarly, in a separate decision in a case brought by the anti-LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Carroll Independent School District, O’Connor — a George W. Bush appointee — blocked enforcement of the new rules in the North Texas district’s 11 schools.
O’Connor wrote in his decision that the Biden administration’s protections for LGBTQ+ students undermine “over fifty years of progress for women and girls made possible by Title IX.” He added, “Worse still, the Final Rule endangers not only women and girls, but all students.”
According to NBC News, the DOE released a statement following Kacsmaryk and O’Connor’s decisions, defending the new rules as being meant “to realize the Title IX statutory guarantee.”
The two Texas rulings follow three other similar decisions that blocked the administration’s LGBTQ+ protections in 14 states, including Alaska, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia, and also Stillwater, Oklahoma.
