On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to temporarily uphold lower court rulings preventing the government from enforcing changes to a law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs.
The SCOTUS ruling comes as the result of two challenges, brought by ten states, to parts of the Biden administration’s April 2024 attempts at reinterpreting Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. In June, federal courts in Louisiana and Kentucky deemed the states likely to win their cases, and stopped the rule from being enforced in all ten states involved. The Biden administration requested that higher federal courts temporarily enforce the uncontested parts of the rule, but both courts denied the requests.
The challenges focused on three provisions that would extend the legal protection against sex discrimination to include ‘gender discrimination.’
The provisions challenged were:
- that “sex discrimination” include discrimination based on gender identity—meaning schools would be forced to treat students identifying as transgender as their chosen gender, including allowing men to compete in sports as women if they identified as such;
- that schools that deny male students identifying as women the right to use women’s locker rooms and bathrooms (and vice versa) would be in violation of federal law;
- that “hostile-environment harassment” be defined to include harassment based on gender identity. Objectors to this provision pointed out that it could force students and teachers to refer to students by their chosen pronoun, regardless of the students’ actual sex.
The unsigned SCOTUS opinion stated that the justices were in agreement on putting the three provisions on hold while litigation continues, “including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.” The majority opinion also said that the new definition of “sex discrimination” affected too many other provisions of the new rule to only stop the three challenged provisions from taking effect, and therefore chose to let the lower courts’ rulings stand, which put a halt to the entire rule.
In addition to the challenges from Louisiana and Kentucky, the April 2024 rule is also being challenged in courts in Texas, Kansas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Missouri.
