The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to allow the Biden administration enforce portions of a new rule that would protect transgender students from discrimination under Title IX as legal proceedings continue.
The August 16 ruling keeps two separate orders from federal judges in Louisiana and Kentucky to remain. Those orders had blocked the U.S. Department of Education from enforcing the rule across 10 states. The federal government had asked the court to stay parts of those decisions, but the court refused in a 5-4 ruling.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the decision means Louisiana schools will not have to comply with the federal government’s “demand that they let boys in girls’ bathrooms as our children return to school.”
“I’m grateful that the Supreme Court agreed not to block our injunction against this radical rewrite of Title IX,” Murrill said. “Other than the 19th Amendment guaranteeing our right to vote, Title IX has been the most successful law in history at ensuring equal opportunity for women in education at all levels and in collegiate athletics.
“This fight isn’t over, but I’ll keep fighting to block this radical agenda that eviscerates Title IX.”
The minority of the court would have allowed part of the rules to take effect, but all nine members of the court said key disputed changes – such as a new definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity as well as restriction on same-sex spaces – could remain blocked.
"All members of the court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity," the unsigned opinion states.
In April, the Biden administration announced plans to expand Title IX protections to LGBTQ students. The rule took effect August 1 in 24 states, but federal judges temporarily have blocked it in 26 states because of legal challenges.
In June, federal courts in Louisiana and Kentucky blocked enforcement of the entire rule across the 10 states involved in those two lawsuits. The federal government then asked to allow temporary enforcement of part of the rule to no avail. That’s when the cases went to the Supreme Court.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the liberals on the court, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, wrote in her partial dissent,
"By blocking the government from enforcing scores of regulations that respondents never challenged and that bear no apparent relationship to respondents' alleged injuries, the lower courts went beyond their authority to remedy the discrete harms alleged here,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the partial dissent also signed by Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch. Sotomayor also wrote that the "injunctions this Court leaves in place will burden the government more than necessary,” noting that blocking the government from enforcing any other part of the rule "needlessly impairs the government from enforcing Title IX and deprives potential claimants of protections against forms of sex discrimination not at issue in respondents' suit."