WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court On Friday, he barred the Biden administration from enacting parts of a the main regulation on sex discrimination in education embroiled in litigation to protect transgender students.
The court rejected the administration’s request to allow less controversial parts of the regulation, many of which have nothing to do with gender identity, to take effect in states where it has been challenged, while lower courts debate controversial transgender issues.
“In these limited pleadings and extraordinary appeals, the Government has not presented this Court with sufficient grounds to overturn the lower courts’ provisional findings that the three provisions deemed unlawful are intertwined with and affect the other provisions of the rule.” Read the Supreme Court opinion.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar did not ask the court to block lower court rulings that would have required transgender students to use restrooms that match their gender identity or that would have prevented affected people from using the transgender person’s preferred pronoun. These requirements are maintained in affected states.
The Supreme Court’s action does not affect states that do not object to the regulation, and they will be covered by the rule.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented in part from the majority’s order.
“By preventing the Government from enforcing multiple regulations that respondents never challenged and that had no apparent connection to defendants’ alleged injuries, the lower courts exceeded their authority to address the discrete harms alleged here,” Sotomayor said in a dissenting opinion. The decisions put in place by this Court will burden the Government more than necessary.”
Current regulation was finalized by the Department of Education in April and applies to any educational institution receiving federal funding.
In addition to recognizing protections for transgender students, the rule includes other unchallenged provisions, including new measures for pregnant and postpartum students and employees. The regulation requires, for example, access to lactation spaces and restrooms for pregnant students.
A total of 26 states challenged the rule, and 22 received lower court rulings preventing the administration from fully implementing it.
The Supreme Court’s action involved plaintiffs in two separate cases, one in Kentucky and one in Louisiana, that succeeded in blocking the entire set of rules in their states.
A group of six states led by Tennessee, as well as some individual plaintiffs, sued Kentucky, while Louisiana led another lawsuit involving three other states and various local jurisdictions.
In both cases, federal judges blocked the regulation entirely because it applied to plaintiffs, and appeals courts refused to narrow the scope of the rulings, prompting the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Prelogar wrote in court filings that the lower court judges erred in blocking provisions that the challengers had not even addressed.
In addition, he argued that the Department of Education’s finding that gender identity is protected under Title IX should stand because of what he called a “direct application” of the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, because gender identity is protected under a similarly worded Title. Title VII covering employment discrimination.
The petitioners challenged in court filings that the entire rule be blocked because, as Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill said in her filing, “the rule’s redefinition of sex discrimination covers all 423 pages.”
Megan Lebowitz contributed.