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The Biden administration has most likely violated federal law by issuing an executive order and guidance equating sex and gender identity without proper rulemaking.
They have plausibly pressured 20 states to change their laws recognizing sex-based rights or they risk losing “substantial federal funding,” U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr. ruled Friday.
The preliminary injunction said that the White House and agencies wrongly invoked the Supreme Court’s ruling in transgender employment case, to justify the changes they told to states.
Just The News reported:
The ruling is a major win for Republican attorneys general led by Tennessee’s Herbert Slattery, who sued the administration last summer for allegedly violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by unilaterally redefining federal law to not only prohibit male-female distinctions in school sports, restrooms, and locker rooms but also compel employers to use employees’ preferred pronouns.
Last year, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs Atchley’s court, prohibited a public university from compelling a Christian professor to use a student’s preferred pronouns. Shawnee State University paid Nicholas Meriwether $400,000 in an April settlement.
The injunction again confirms the Department of Education (DOE) “cannot pretend a ‘guidance document’ is merely advisory while simultaneously threatening to enforce its terms,” Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Just the News.
Atchley’s ruling could also help students, parents, and school employees in legal challenges to gender identity policies that are premised, explicitly or implicitly, on federal interpretations of the word “sex” and the threatened loss of funding for noncompliance.
The Alliance Defending Freedom cheered the injunction. In a motion to intervene on behalf of the Association of Christian Schools International and three female student-athletes at public schools last fall, it argued the federal guidance puts the private schools at a competitive disadvantage with public schools.
The Alliance Defending Freedom shared in a statement:
Twenty state attorneys general, led by the state of Tennessee, requested the preliminary injunction order in their lawsuit challenging the guidance documents, issued by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. One document interprets Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits “discrimination on the basis of sex,” to bar discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Among other things, this would require that schools subject to Title IX allow males who identify as female to participate on female athletic teams and use female-designated showers and locker rooms.
Judge Atchley has upset the pro-transgender Human Rights Campaign. They said he is “another example of far-right judges legislating from the bench.”
The Trump appointee said he has jurisdiction to rule on the guidance documents issued by the DOE and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
At least 10 of the 20 states have shown they have both “a concrete and particularized” and “actual or imminent” threat to their ability to enforce their own laws that are “fairly traceable” to the administration.
