Texas sues Biden administration for right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced that he has sued the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) over new Title IX guidelines that make discrimination against LGBTQ+ students in education illegal.

“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” Paxton said in a statement. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality. Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.”

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Earlier this month, the DOE unveiled new Title IX rules to address the needs of LGBTQ+ students. The rules interpret Title IX, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education, as a legal protection against anti-LGBTQ+ school policies. The idea is that it’s impossible to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity without taking sex into account, a legal argument that the Supreme Court has already used in its 2020 Bostock v. Clayton Co. ruling with respect to job discrimination.

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The new rules do not discuss the issue of transgender student-athletes and which teams they can play on. However, any school that receives federal funding will no longer be able to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. This could affect states and school districts with policies to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents or ban trans students from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender. The new rules could also give students who face discrimination recourse in federal courts.

Paxton’s lawsuit claims that Biden misinterpreted Title IX, saying that the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling was based on the phrase “because of sex” in Title VII, whereas Title IX is completely different because it bans discrimination “on the basis of sex.”

“Bostock holds only that Title VII’s prohibition on ‘sex’ discrimination prohibits employers from firing or refusing to hire individuals ‘for being homosexual or transgender,'” Paxton argues in his filing. He argues that discrimination against bisexuals is allowed under Bostock as long as an entity discriminates against both bi men and bi women equally. Bisexual people are not mentioned in that ruling. This bizarre legal argument was used in a lawsuit filed by a Christian conservative businessman in Texas in 2021.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered the Texas Education Agency today to ignore the new Title IX rules, something that at least four other states — Louisiana, Florida, Oklahoma, and South Carolina — have done or announced that they would do.

On X, he argued that protecting transgender students takes away from protections for women.

“Congress wrote Title IX to protect women,” he wrote. “Biden, with no authority to do so, rewrote Title IX to protect men who identify as women.”

Both Abbott and Paxton have a long history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights in their careers, targeting LGBTQ+ youth. Just last week, Abbott ranted about a male teacher who wore a dress to some school events in the state who was driven to quit his job by online trolls. Abbott said that the teacher was “trying to normalize the concept that this type of behavior is OK” and said, “This is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.”

In 2022, Paxton called LGBTQ+ people “sexual propagandists and predators” while denouncing a school’s Pride Week.

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