By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -Five Republican-led states on Monday filed lawsuits challenging new Biden administration regulations that bar schools and colleges that receive federal funding from discriminating against students based on their gender identity.
State attorneys general filed the lawsuits in federal courts in Louisiana and Texas challenging a U.S. Department of Education rule that extends sex discrimination protections in federal civil rights law to LGBTQ students.
The department said the rule issued earlier this month clarified that the prohibition against sex-based discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal funding contained in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 also includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Title IX applies to both public and private schools, nearly all of which nationally accept some form of federal funding.
The department cited a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that a ban against sex discrimination in the workplace contained in a different law, Title VII, covered gay and transgender workers.
Courts often rely on interpretations of Title VII when analyzing Title IX as both laws bar discrimination on the basis of sex.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County did not extend beyond Title VII to other federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination.
That lawsuit, along with a separate one filed by Republican state attorneys general in Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho, argued the rule unlawfully interprets Title IX in a way that conflicts with the statute’s text, which they said since its enactment has defined “sex” as a person’s biological sex.
The states said that unless the rule was vacated, schools would be prohibited from distinguishing between biological males and females in athletic and educational opportunities and would be required to allow transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms conforming to their gender identities.
An Education Department spokesperson in a statement said it crafted the rule “to give complete effect to the Title IX statutory guarantee that no person experiences sex discrimination in federally funded education.”
Paxton filed his lawsuit in federal court in Amarillo, whose only active judge, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, is an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump and former Christian legal activist who often rules against LGBTQ rights.
Kacsmaryk, who gained national attention last year after suspending approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, had in 2022 in a different case concluded the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling had no effect on Title IX’s “ordinary public meaning.”
The case by the other four states was assigned to Chief U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee in Monroe, Louisiana, who has often sided with challengers to Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
