A federal judge on Thursday struck down President Joe Biden’s rules granting accommodations for transgender students, such as cross-sex bathroom usage, into federal education laws.
Detractors have called the Department of Education’s rules reinterpreting Title IX a “rewrite” of the law, because they tried to open pathways that may have let males into girls’ bathrooms or sports, when the law was originally written to prevent sex discrimination against girls and women in schools and colleges.
U.S. District Court Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky agreed with that interpretation.
He vacated the new rules Thursday.
They’re arbitrary and capricious, exceed the executive branch’s power and are unconstitutional, the judge wrote.
A predominant Republican faction of Wyoming legislators celebrated the ruling.
“We applaud this common sense ruling out of Kentucky,” the Wyoming Freedom Caucus posted Thursday to X, formerly Twitter. “We will not rest until common sense is codified in Wyoming and our women and girls are protected from the predations of the radical Left.”
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus is a group of Republicans that has taken control of the Wyoming House of Representatives, and that often emphasizes social issues in its legislative approach.
This Five Years’ Argument
For nearly five years, litigants have been arguing about whether a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case banning employers from discriminating against employees for being transgender could transfer into federal education laws.
The implications of the argument are huge: “discrimination” against transgender students could mean keeping males out of girls’ sports and girls’ bathrooms, or requiring teachers to use transgender students’ preferred pronouns.
Judge Reeves’ Thursday ruling proclaims the two laws completely separate, and Biden’s interpretation of Title IX to be directly contrary to the law’s essence and purpose.
Reeves also declared it unconstitutional, saying it could compel teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns against their parents’ wishes, and it would violate teachers’ freedom of speech.
“Put simply, there is nothing in the text or statutory design of Title IX to suggest that discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ means anything other than it has since Title IX’s inception,” wrote Reeves, “that recipients of federal funds under Title IX may not treat a person worse than another similarly-situated on the basis of the person’s sex, i.e., male or female.”
Title IX makes schools that receive money via its provisions offer equal opportunities to males and females. But it has always allowed for differing arrangements that hinge on sex distinctions, like separate changing rooms and dormitories, Reeves added.
“Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless,” wrote the judge.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
