Eleven states have joined together will plans to sue the Obama administration over a controversial federal guidance requiring public schools and universities to allow transgender students to use the restrooms, showers, and overnight accommodations of the opposite biological sex based on their gender of choice.
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The federal guidelines recommend that public schools let students use the bathrooms of the gender with which they identify, instead of what is on their birth certificates.
At a press conference to announce the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused President Barack Obama of attempting to skirt Congress on the issue and said that 10 additional states had joined the lawsuit.
Texas is leading the lawsuit, and governors from Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Utah are also on board.
The complaint alleges that the Obama administration conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings into laboratories for a massive social experiment. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said “there is no room in our schools for discrimination”. Bryant says the bathroom guidance is an example of “federal overreach”.
Officials in 11 states, including Texas, will sue the White House over its new transgender directive in schools, once again pitting the Lone Star State against an administration they have relished fighting.
“There’s not been a single increase of incidences in any bad behavior in bathrooms in any of the places where positive nondiscrimination laws have been passed”, he said. Superintendent David Thweatt said his schools have no transgender students to his knowledge but defended the district taking on the federal government.
“Our local schools are now in the crosshairs of the Obama administration, which maintains it will punish those schools who do not comply with its orders”.
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However, he defends the lawsuit because the policy was forced upon them by the federal government at the risk of losing funding. The law applies to schools and many other places.
