
Several Republican-led states have announced they are legally challenging or disregarding the Biden administration’s Title IX rules which now expand “sex discrimination” to include discrimination based on “gender identity.”
A summary of the new rules states that “sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”
“Joe Biden’s extreme gender ideology is a threat to the safety and dignity of women and girls,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement last week following the announcement of the new Title IX rules. “The people – who can’t even tell you what a woman is – just killed Title IX. This won’t stand – lawsuit coming soon.”
On Monday, Murrill followed through with her statement by announcing in a series of posts on X that she had filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Education Department “to save Title IX and protect and the myriad of interests threat[en]ed by these new regulations.”
“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,” Murrill continued, noting that “[f]orcing 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.”
Murrill said “the Final Rule drives a dagger through the heart of Title IX’s mandate,” adding that the rule “prohibits single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms,” and “compels school officials to use pronouns associated with a student’s claimed ‘gender identity’ and to force students to do so as well.”
The Louisiana AG cautioned further that the effects of the rule change will be “shocking and severe.”
“Boys and girls will be forced to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and perhaps even lodging on overnight field trips with members of the opposite sex,” she warned.
Following the Biden administration’s announcement of the new rule, in a letter to state school boards, Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley also said the changes “recklessly endanger students and seek to dismantle opportunities for females.”
The expanded definition of sex discrimination in the new rule, Brumley added, is “unsupported by the text of Title IX, its implementing regulations, and the law’s extensive congressional history and record of debate and deliberation. This rule runs contradictory to the entire foundation of Title IX.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday as well filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration to block the expansion of federal education sex discrimination protections to include students claiming to identify as transgender.
“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,” Paxton said. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality. Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.”
America First Legal (AFL) is serving as co-counsel in the Texas lawsuit.
“America First Legal is honored to stand with the great Ken Paxton and the State of Texas in filing this emergency lawsuit to stop Biden’s war on women,” AFL President Stephen Miller said, adding:
Biden’s new Title IX regulation is a vile obscenity: it forces women and girls to share locker rooms and restrooms with men. It forces them to call a he, a she, and to pretend in every way that a man is a woman, humiliating, degrading, and erasing women. This is an abomination, and as outside counsel for Texas we will battle this regulation in court with all the legal fight we can bring. It must be defeated for the sake of American women and for the sake of our daughters.
Other Republican-led states have indicated their intention to disregard the new Title IX rules.
“We will not comply,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday in a video posted to X, asserting Joe Biden is trying “to inject gender ideology into education, undermining opportunities for girls and women, violating parents’ rights, and abusing his constitutional authority.”
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. instructed superintendents not to take steps toward implementing the Biden changes to Title IX.
In South Carolina, Republican State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver similarly advised school districts to ignore the new Biden regulations.
“South Carolina students are not pawns to be sacrificed in cynical political gambits,” Weaver wrote April 23 in a memo to the state’s superintendents, the Post and Courier reported.
Accordingly, our State will defend the inherent dignity of every person, while refusing to upend long-standing federal law, violate common sense, or acquiesce to radical attempts to redefine biological reality by bureaucratic diktat.
Oklahoma superintendents were likewise instructed not to change any policies based on the announcement of the new Biden Title IX rule.
State Superintendent Ryan Walters warned school district officials in a letter of “some serious concerns with the legality of these rule changes,” as OKCFOX.com reported.
“Please do not make any district policy changes based on the new Title IX regulations,” Walters wrote. “These federal rule changes are illegal and making policy changes before the courts come to a definitive ruling on the legality of these rules could put your district out of compliance with other current and legal state and federal statute.”
“Biden’s re-write of Title IX is one of the most illegal and radical moves we have ever seen from the Federal Government,” Walters also said in a video posted to X. “Oklahoma will not sit idly by while radicals trample on the Constitution and take away women’s rights. We are taking swift and aggressive action against Biden in his war on women.”
