A Texas Judge has blocked President Obama’s directive on transgender bathrooms.
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Robertson said the nondiscrimination protections in Title IX applied to transgender students even before the administration issued its guidelines last spring.
“O$3 ur goal has been from the beginning to provide for the safety and security and dignity of students all across the country”, said John Earnest, press secretary for President Obama.
But a group of five civil rights organizations supporting the Obama policy said legal precedent protects transgender students from discrimination, which a single judge can not overturn. “There’s a decent chance the U.S. Supreme Court could address this issue in the near future”.
The Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 -which prohibits discrimination based on sex by federally funded educational institutions-prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.
She doesn’t see Monday’s ruling as something that prevents Denton ISD from “doing the right thing”, she said, adding, “It gives other schools permission to discriminate and harass transgender students and they won’t lose their Title IX funding”.
The decision is likely to be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is a rather conservative appeals court.
In his ruling, O’Connor said there was a strong likelihood that the dissenting states will win their lawsuit.
“I$3 t can not be disputed that the plain meaning of the term “sex” as used… following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth”.
The Justice Department has emphasized that the guidelines are not laws.
Both cases challenge the interpretation by the Obama administration of civil rights law addressing discrimination on the basis of “sex”.
But they were also backed up by a threat to withhold federal education money from states that refused to comply, drawing objections from 13 states, led by Texas, that sued.
The policy calls for schools to allow students use the bathroom corresponding to the gender they identify with. Republicans have argued such laws are common-sense privacy safeguards. Ten other states (Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming) filed a similar lawsuit in a federal court in Nebraska.
The Obama administration had told the court that recipients of federal education dollars were “clearly on notice” that anti-discrimination polices must be followed. He also said the guidelines had the effect of law and contradicted existing legislative and regulatory texts.
This temporarily will block the policy the Obama administration put in place just before on the first day of school.
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Paul Castillo is a Dallas attorney for the gay rights group Lambda Legal, which had urged the court to let the White House directive stand.
