The lawsuit comes a week after Texas attorney general Ken Paxton accused the Obama administration of trying to bully Texas schools into allowing men “to have open access to girls in bathrooms”.
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Around two weeks ago, the Obama administration issued a directive requiring all public school districts to allow students to use bathrooms of the gender they identify with.
The US Justice Department sued the state of North Carolina last month, asking a federal court to rule that the state’s anti-trans HB2 law violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a federal court in Dallas, names the Department of Education, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Education Secretary John King, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other top US officials as defendants.
The lawsuit argues that the administration’s guidance “has no basis in law” and could cause “seismic changes in the operations of the nation’s school districts”.
Texas – one of the conservative states challenging the directive – stands to lose $10bn education funding.
Gov. Scott Walker signed off on Wisconsin joining 10 other states in filing a lawsuit against the Obama administration over transgender bathrooms.
In a news conference Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said the state joined the suit to protect the Harrold school district.
“In President Obama’s final drive to fundamentally transform America, he has pushed aside the concerns of parents and schools, the privacy and safety of students, and ignored the boundaries of his constitutional power”, said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
The letter also with clause, said to lessen the federal fund to non-bided institutions if they not imply the new directive in their school.
The battle is part of a wider debate on equal rights in the United States, where a flurry of initiatives have targeted the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) communities since a historic Supreme Court decision past year.
The law applied to all public facilities in schools.
Education officials in Arizona said campuses already had policies to protect students from bullying and discrimination “regardless of their gender identity”.
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Steve Kilar, communications director for the ACLU of Arizona, said the lawsuit is created to bully vulnerable children.
