Washington — The Supreme Court decided Friday not to allow the Biden administration to enforce parts of a new rule, including protections for transgender students from discrimination under Title IX, while the lawsuit proceeds.
The Supreme Court left in place two separate orders from federal courts in Kentucky and Louisiana that blocked the Department of Education from enforcing the entire rule in 10 states. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to set aside part of the ruling, but the court denied the request.
According to the order, four of the nine justices would have allowed some of the rules to go into effect, but all members of the court agreed that major controversial changes, including a new definition of “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” and restrictions on gay spaces, could remain blocked.
“Today, all justices agreed that Plaintiffs were entitled to injunctive relief under three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that redefines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned opinion.
The measures at issue in the dispute are: Biden administration announces In April, Title IX protections were extended to LGBTQ students. This landmark 50-year-old law prohibits educational institutions receiving federal funds from discriminating on the basis of gender. The rule went into effect on August 1, but less than half of states have implemented it. Federal judges have temporarily blocked it in 26 states due to legal challenges.
The legal battles that took place before the Supreme Court challenged three provisions of the rule, involving two groups of states. The first recognized that Title IX’s prohibition against sex discrimination includes gender identity. The second expanded the definition of “hostile environmental harassment” to include harassment based on gender identity. The third clarified that schools violate Title IX when they prohibit transgender students from using bathrooms and other facilities that match their gender identity.
One case was filed by four states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho—and the Louisiana Department of Education. The second case was filed by six states—Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia.
In June, in federal district court Louisiana And Kentucky blocked enforcement of the entire rule in 10 states involved in the lawsuits, judging that the states were more likely to win the lawsuits. In both cases, the Biden administration asked federal appeals courts to temporarily allow enforcement of parts of the rule (the uncontested provisions), but each rejected the request in a split ruling.
The Supreme Court responded to the government’s argument that it should separate the three provisions to give effect to the otherwise uncontested portion of the rule, agreeing with the lower court that the three provisions “cannot be readily separated from the rest” because “the new definition of sex discrimination is so intertwined with and affects so many other provisions of the new rule.” The Supreme Court said the government had not provided “a sufficient basis to interfere with the lower court’s intermediate conclusions” and had “failed to properly identify which specific provisions are sufficiently independent of the prohibited definition provisions to remain in effect.”
“The lower court overstepped its authority to remedy the individual harms alleged here by blocking enforcement of numerous regulations that defendants never challenged and that are clearly unrelated to the harm they allege,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her partial dissent, joined by the court’s liberals Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch. “The preliminary injunction that this court leaves in place will unnecessarily burden the government,” she predicted.
She noted that the uncontested provisions include “reasonable modifications” to allow new mothers to breastfeed or pump milk, and to allow pregnant students to address the health needs of pregnancy. Another provision prohibits schools from making pre-employment inquiries about applicants’ marital status. Sotomayor said those provisions “do not address gender identity discrimination or hostile environment harassment.” Therefore, she wrote, blocking the government from enforcing other parts of the rule “needlessly impedes the government from enforcing Title IX and denies potential claimants protections for forms of gender discrimination that are not at issue in the respondents’ lawsuits.”
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief, arguing that the district court’s preliminary injunction was “excessively broad” because it blocked dozens of provisions of the rule that the state had not challenged, and therefore the lower court ruled that the preliminary injunction could not possibly be illegal.
“The district court’s injunction would block the Department of Education from enforcing dozens of provisions of a critical rule enacting Title IX, the essential civil rights law that protects millions of students from gender discrimination,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Froleg wrote in two motions.
She said the April 2024 rule is a “catch-all” measure, most of which does not address gender identity. Instead, the provisions include clarifications to definitions for more than a dozen terms, including “complaint,” “elementary school” and “graduate school.”
While she acknowledged that it is common for federal regulations to be challenged before they go into effect, she criticized lower courts in such cases for taking a “flowery approach” to preliminary relief.
“The harm here is particularly severe because Title IX is one of the core federal civil rights statutes that protects against discrimination in the nation’s education system,” Prelogar wrote. “If the court does not grant the requested reprieve, the Department will be unable to demonstrate the statute’s critical protections in broad swaths of the country.”
But in a lawsuit involving four Louisiana states, Republican officials said in a Supreme Court filing that the Biden administration’s rule would have a “profound impact” on schools, teachers and families.
They alleged that the Department of Education turned Title IX and its promise to “provide equal educational opportunities for both sexes” into a 423-page mandate that requires institutions to provide boys with access to girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities, and to require teachers and students to use transgender people’s preferred pronouns.
“The Department of Education cannot seriously dispute that a partial moratorium would create widespread confusion, giving teachers only a few days at most before school starts to understand their obligations under a judicially blue-penciled rule,” the Republican attorneys general wrote. “And that uncertainty and harm would impact parents and students alike.”
They said there was uncertainty about how the effectively blocked rule would work, leaving parents unable to make decisions about whether to send their children to public schools.
In a separate filing in the Kentucky case, officials from six states accused the Biden administration of forcing schools to spend “enormous amounts of money” to comply with new rules in just three months.
They warned the court not to “create last-minute chaos and unnecessarily divert precious resources from schools, students and a sovereign nation.”
In addition to the Louisiana and Kentucky cases, several other challenges to the Biden administration’s Title IX rules are pending in lower courts.
The Education Department’s Title IX amendments come amid a wave of legislation targeting transgender youth in Republican-led states in recent years. More than 20 states restrict access to treatments such as puberty blocking drugs, hormone therapy or surgery for minors with gender identity disorders. The constitutionality of one of those laws, in Tennessee, is being questioned. Reviewed by the Supreme Court In the fall.
At least 11 states have laws prohibiting transgender people from using bathrooms and other facilities in schools that match their gender identity, and 25 states have laws prohibiting transgender people from using bathrooms and other facilities in schools that match their gender identity. Ban transgender girls Competing on girls’ sports teams at school.
Jan Crawford contributed to this report.
