Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has initiated a lawsuit against the Biden administration, challenging a new federal rule that prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in educational settings.
The legal action highlights the ongoing conflict between state and federal policies regarding sexual orientation and gender identity protections.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in Amarillo, Texas, in collaboration with America First Legal.
Earlier this month, the United States Department of Education finalized regulations mandating that all school programs and activities, including those in Texas, must operate without discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Schools failing to comply by August risk losing federal funding.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded by instructing the state’s education agency to ignore these new directives, criticizing them as an attempt to enforce “leftist beliefs” on the state.
In a statement, Attorney General Paxton expressed strong opposition to the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which historically aimed to prevent gender discrimination.
Paxton said that the state will not allow Biden to “rewrite Title IX on a whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology.
He further described the move as “plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality.”
America First Legal also criticized the Biden administration’s action, noting that Title IX is a federal law that forbids sex-based discrimination in any educational program receiving federal funds, encompassing K-12 schools, colleges, and universities.
America First Legal President Stephen Miller said, “Biden’s new Title IX regulation is a vile obscenity: it forces women and girls to share locker rooms and restrooms with men. It forces them to call a he, a she, and to pretend in every way that a man is a woman, humiliating, degrading, and erasing women. This is an abomination, and as outside counsel for Texas, we will battle this regulation in court with all the legal fight we can bring. It must be defeated for the sake of American women and for the sake of our daughters.”
The Education Department refrained from commenting on the ongoing litigation. However, a spokesperson conveyed on Monday that the department diligently formulated the final Title IX regulations after a comprehensive and meticulous process.
A department spokesperson stated “We look forward to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience.”
This legal challenge from Texas follows previous efforts by the state and other Republican-led states to block similar federal policies. These states successfully halted a comparable initiative two years ago through judicial intervention.
Texas has also enacted state laws that impose restrictions on transgender student-athletes and mandate the use of school facilities according to sex assigned at birth, further highlighting the state-federal clash over LGBTQ rights in education.
