A federal judge has temporarily halted the enforcement of new rules from the Biden administration aimed at preventing discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana issued a temporary injunction on Thursday, blocking the updated Title IX policy from taking effect on August 1 in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Montana.
In April, the U.S. Department of Education announced plans to expand Title IX to protect LGBTQ+ students, prompting the four states to challenge the policy in federal court. Judge Doughty stated in his order that Title IX, the 52-year-old civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, applies only to biological women. He also criticized the Biden administration for overstepping its authority.
“This case demonstrates the abuse of power by executive federal agencies in the rulemaking process,” Doughty wrote. “The separation of powers and system of checks and balances exist in this country for a reason.”
The order from Doughty, a federal court appointee of President Donald Trump, prevents the updated Title IX regulations from taking effect until the court case is resolved or a higher court overturns the order.
Opponents of the Title IX rule changes argue that conflating gender identity with sex would undermine protections in federal law and ultimately harm biological women. Gender identity refers to the gender an individual identifies as, which might differ from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who filed the suit in the state’s Western District federal court, called the new regulations “dangerous and unlawful.” In a statement Thursday evening, she said the rules would have placed an unfair burden on every school, college, and university in the country.
“This is a victory for women and girls,” Murrill said in the statement. “When Joe Biden forced his illegal and radical gender ideology on America, Louisiana said NO! Along with Idaho, Mississippi, and Montana, states are fighting back in defense of the law, the safety and prosperity of women and girls, and basic American values.”
Title IX is considered a landmark policy that provided for equal access for women in educational settings and has been applied to academic and athletic pursuits.
Doughty’s order comes a day after a similar development in Texas, where Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, declared that the Biden administration exceeded its authority, The Texas Tribune reported. Texas filed its own lawsuit against the federal government to block enforcement of the new rules, which Governor Greg Abbott had instructed schools to ignore. Texas is one of several states to approve laws that prohibit transgender student-athletes from participating on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
Lawsuits have been filed in 26 states, including Arkansas, to stop the new Title IX regulations from taking effect.
Earlier Thursday, Republicans in Congress moved ahead with their effort to undo the revised Biden Title IX policy. Nearly 70 GOP lawmakers have signed onto legislation to reverse the education department’s final rule through the Congressional Review Act, which Congress can use to overturn certain federal agency actions. Biden is expected to veto the legislation if it advances to his desk.
“Title IX has paved the way for our girls to access new opportunities in education, scholarships, and athletics. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden is destroying all that progress,” U.S. Representative Mary Miller, R-Indiana, author of the legislation, said Thursday.
In a related development, the state of Florida is asking a federal court to stop the Biden administration’s civil rights protections for transgender and other LGBTQ people from going into effect while a courtroom battle with the government plays out. Florida said that the Department of Health and Human Services’ rule the state is challenging would be effective July 5 unless the court grants the state’s request for a stay.
Should the rule go into effect, “Florida will face an untenable choice: renounce its sovereign interest in protecting the health and safety of its citizens and suffer irrecoverable costs, or lose federal financial assistance from HHS, an untenable option,” the state said in its motion. “Without temporary relief, Florida will remain caught between the 2024 Rules and Florida law, facing ‘actual and imminent’ injury to its sovereign interests and unrecoverable monetary loss.”
Florida’s request comes about a week after the state sued the HHS over its rule interpreting Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act as prohibiting health-care discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. That lawsuit accuses the rule of forcing doctors to perform gender-affirming care surgery. The HHS believes it has “the extraordinary power” to put out rules that compel “States to allow and even pay for controversial ‘gender-transition’ interventions,” Florida said in its request for a stay, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Additionally, the agency’s “attempt to drastically expand the contours of sex discrimination runs headlong into binding Eleventh Circuit precedent,” Florida said.
The HHS declined to comment on Florida’s stay request. In its rule, the HHS said that “providers do not have an affirmative obligation to offer any health care, including gender-affirming care, that they do not think is clinically appropriate or if religious freedom and conscience protections apply.”
The rule has since faced another legal challenge from a Mississippi children’s clinic. Florida in its case argues the rule unlawfully tries preempting the state’s “laws, regulations, and standards of care restricting gender-transition interventions and preventing the use of public funds for these purposes.” The state also said that should the rule go into effect, it would need to “amend the State Group Health Insurance Program to cover gender-transition interventions, suffering irrecoverable monetary losses to administer and fund such payments while this suit proceeds.”
Source: Louisiana Illuminator, The Texas Tribune
