Two days after trustees of the tiny Harrold school district voted to challenge the Obama administration’s transgender restroom directive, the Harrold superintendent was standing beside Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in Austin at the announcement of a lawsuit against the federal government. His administration’s guidance to schools on transgender bathrooms was in accordance a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, Rudner said.
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The lawsuit accuses the Obama administration of conspiring ‘to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights’.
Writing to public school districts and universities on May 13, the Justice and Education Departments laid out guidelines on creating a safe environment for transgender students.
The question of whether federal civil rights law protects transgender people has not been definitively answered by the courts and may ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
LePage stands alone in signing on to the suit in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the state of ME, where the Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that schools can not discriminate against transgender students.
“What would happen to me if I went into a biker bar, and I have to go into the men’s bathroom”, says Decker.
Texas has led the charge in dozens of lawsuits against the Obama administration. It’s fairly routine for the Justice and Education departments to issue guidance related to Title IX, she said, so “the lawsuit’s portrayal of such a letter as extraordinary or overreaching has no basis”. That includes not treating transgender students differently from others of the same gender identity, officials said. “As a matter of law, the state of ME is not a party to this lawsuit”.
“Recently, we have seen the president force overtime rules, which will have a devastating effect on our economy that has been rebounding for the past five years”, she said in an email.
The guidance was issued after the Justice Department and North Carolina sued each other overs a state law that requires transgender people to use the public bathroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificate. Although some politicians, parents, elected officials and school districts embraced the directive, others aggressively argued against it and said the administration was overstepping its authority.
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Three individual school districts have also jointed the federal lawsuit, according to the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas and obtained by CNN. Critics claim it’s discrimination against transgender people. “A transgender person is someone who has probably agonized for years over who they are, what that means for their whole family”.
