Texas challenges Title IX protections for LGBT students

AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — The state of Texas sued the Department of Education Monday over its new rules on what constitutes sex-based discrimination at federally funded educational institutions. 

Under an order by President Joe Biden, the department expanded Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the Biden administration of “destroying legal protections for women.”

“This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.”  

The 30-page federal lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of Texas Amarillo Division, claims the Biden administration twisted the more than 50-year-old law. Historically speaking, the state argues, Title IX only prohibits discrimination based on biological sex. 

In addition, the state says the new rules lower the standard for what constitutes sexual harassment. Citing a 1999 case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the state argues that Title IX protects individuals from sexual harassment that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victims of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school.”

The new rule updates this language to define sexual harassment as, “unwelcome, subjectively and objectively offensive, and sufficiently severe or pervasive to limit or deny a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from a recipient’s education program or activity.”

If the change is allowed to stand, the state posits that students and faculty in schools throughout the state will be subject to “onerous investigations” for not addressing students with their preferred pronouns. 

Spurring the Biden administration’s update to Title IX was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. In that case, the justices ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, also applied to people who are gay or transgender.

Texas argues in its complaint that the high court’s ruling in Bostock did not give Biden the authority to make its revisions to Title IX because the central issue in that case concerned Title VII, a separate statute.

The state wants the federal court to postpone the effective date of the new rules, declare that the administration acted outside of its authority and deem the new rule arbitrary and capricious, with the goal of permanently blocking the Biden administration from enforcing its interpretation of Title IX. 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to President Biden explaining that he was directing the Texas Education Agency to ignore the new rule and deeming it an “illegal dictate.” 

The Republican Governor also echoed his fellow staunchly conservative attorney general, Ken Paxton, in his piercing rebuke of the president’s actions. 

“You have rewritten Title IX to force schools to treat boys as if they were girls and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity,” Abbott wrote. “This ham-handed effort to impose a leftist belief onto Title IX exceeds your authority as president.”

Abbott has signed several bills into law targeting transgender Texans, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and a prohibition on transgender athletes playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. He has even commented that he would like to see an end to allowing transgender teachers in Texas to wear clothing associated with their gender identity.

Policies affecting transgender Americans have put red states at odds with the Biden administration. The president has characterized laws, like those enacted in Texas, as “un-American” and “attacks” against the transgender community.   

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