By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected a bid by President Joe Biden’s administration to revive a directive that would allow schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms and join sports teams that match their gender. This directive has been blocked for 20 years. Republican-led states.
A panel of the Cincinnati, Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the states in a 2-1 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education’s 2021 guidelines improperly imposed new legal obligations on public schools that do not exist in federal law.
The 6th Circuit said the department did not follow proper procedures for making new rules and did not address whether a federal law banning sex discrimination in education extends protections to LGBTQ students.
The court upheld a Tennessee federal judge’s 2022 decision that blocked enforcement of the guidelines against the 20 states, including the many public universities they operate, pending the outcome of their lawsuit.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education said in a statement that the agency supports the guidelines.
“Every student has the right to feel safe at school,” the spokesperson said.
The office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, did not respond to a request for comment.
An association of Christian schools and a female student-athlete from Arkansas joined the state’s challenge. Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group representing them, praised the ruling in a statement.
“The Biden administration’s radical push to redefine sex threatens the equal opportunities women and girls have enjoyed for 50 years,” said Matt Bowman, an attorney with the group.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Texas blocked enforcement of the guidelines in that state, saying it had improperly rewritten anti-discrimination law. The judge said the guidelines “shockingly transform American education.”
The guidance was in response to a landmark 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found the federal law banning sexual bias in the workplace expanded protections for LGBTQ workers. The Department of Education said the same logic applied under the education law, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, because the two laws use similar language.
The department adopted formal, binding rules in April expanding Title IX protections to LGBTQ students, who are not affected by Friday’s ruling.
A federal judge in Louisiana on Thursday blocked the new rule from being implemented in four Republican-led states, saying it undermines the purpose of Title IX to “protect biological women from discrimination.”
In their lawsuit over the guidelines, Tennessee and the other states argue that the department did not have the authority to extend the Supreme Court’s ruling to Title IX.
The 6th Circuit on Friday rejected several procedural claims by the Biden administration, including that the Tennessee-led states failed to show that the non-binding guidance documents would harm them.
The guidelines expose the states to lawsuits and the loss of federal funding, which is enough to allow them to pursue the case, wrote Judge John Nalbandian, joined by Judge Joan Larsen. Both judges were appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump.
Circuit Judge Danny Boggs said in a dissent that the states lacked standing to sue because the guidance documents were informal “statements of policy” that cannot be reviewed by courts. Boggs was appointed by Republican former President Ronald Reagan.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Richard Chang, David Gregorio and Leslie Adler)
