The Supreme Court on Friday upheld two lower courts’ temporary injunctions blocking President Joe Biden’s rule applying federal civil rights law to transgender issues in education, including school bathrooms and women’s sports.
The Department of Education under the Biden-Harris administration issued new rules reinterpreting Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in education. The changes force gender ideology on Americans in the name of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Tennessee and Louisiana are leading two lawsuits against the Education Department and its Biden-appointed secretary, Miguel Cardona, seeking injunctions to block the application of the law. The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 5th and 6th Circuits granted preliminary injunctions, blocking the new rules from going into effect.
Cardona appealed to the Supreme Court, and the high court denied the emergency appeal Friday.
Cardona argued that, even if the courts granted an injunction blocking some aspects of the new rules, those aspects could be “severed” from the others, preserving the overall rules. The Supreme Court rejected that argument.
“In this emergency posture in this court, the burden is on the government as applicant to show, among other things, a likelihood of success on its severability argument and that the equities favor a stay,” the justices wrote. “On this limited record and in its emergency applications, the government has not provided this court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling halts the Biden-Harris administration’s rules in the states of Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia; and in Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho.
Tennessee, Louisiana, and others who joined the lawsuits argued that the administration’s Title IX rules unlawfully redefine sex discrimination and violate students’ and employees’ rights to bodily privacy and safety. They argued that a definition of harassment based on the creation of a “hostile environment” violates the First Amendment by requiring students and teachers to use preferred pronouns.
All nine justices on the Supreme Court agreed that Tennessee, Louisiana, and the groups that joined their lawsuits are entitled to interim relief from the administration’s transgender rules. Yet four of the justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented, saying that the injunctions blocking the entire Title IX rules are overbroad.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent conservative Christian law firm, represents a West Virginia high school female athlete and Christian Educators Association International, which joined with Tennessee’s lawsuit. ADF also represents a Louisiana school board serving more than 20,000 students, which joined Louisiana’s lawsuit.
“The Biden-Harris administration’s radical redefinition of sex turns back the clock on equal opportunity for women, undermines fairness, and threatens student safety and privacy,” Jonathan Scruggs, ADF vice president of litigation strategy, said in a public statement on the ruling. “The Supreme Court rightly affirmed the 5th and 6th Circuit decisions to restrain the administration’s illegal efforts to rewrite Title IX while these critical lawsuits continue.”
“This administration is ignoring biological reality, science, and common sense,” Scruggs added. “Female athletes, students, and teachers across the country are right to stand against the administration’s adoption of extreme gender ideology, which would have devastating consequences for students, teachers, administrators, and families.”
The Education Department announced in April that it would redefine “sex” in Title IX rules to include “gender identity,” requiring schools to ignore the biological differences between male and female in favor of “an individual’s sense of their gender.”
These rules relied on a hotly contested interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which Gorsuch—writing for the majority—ruled that discrimination on the basis of sex in federal employment law entailed discrimination on the basis of gender identity. In that decision, Gorsuch clearly wrote that he did not intend this interpretation to apply to areas such as sex-segregated bathrooms or sports teams.
Yet Biden issued an executive order directing federal agencies to “apply Bostock” to all realms of civil rights law, in a flat contradiction of Gorsuch’s narrow ruling.
As Alliance Defending Freedom explained, the Education Department’s rules would force schools to “allow males who claim to identify as female to enter girls’ private spaces such as restrooms, locker rooms, and showers; to participate in girls’ physical education classes; and—despite logically inconsistent disclaimers saying otherwise—to play on girls’ sports teams.”