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By Michael Gryboski
The United States Supreme Court has refused to allow the Biden administration’s rules requiring Title IX antidiscrimination law to include gender identity and sexual orientation to take effect. The rules would have required schools receiving public funding to allow boys who identify as trans to enter girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and athletics.
In a 5-4 decision late Friday, the high court denied an application for a partial stay in order to allow the Education Department rules to take effect, upholding multiple lower court decisions blocking enforcement of the new rule.
According to the majority opinion, “the burden is on the Government as applicant to show, among other things, a likelihood of success on its severability argument and that the equities favor a stay.”
“On this limited record and in its emergency applications, the Government has not provided this Court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule,” continued the opinion in the 12-page ruling.
“Nor has the Government adequately identified which particular provisions, if any, are sufficiently independent of the enjoined definitional provision and thus might be able to remain in effect.”
The opinion also concluded that “the Courts of Appeals will render their decisions” in the litigation surrounding the federal rule change “with appropriate dispatch.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a dissenting opinion, being joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing that the lower court injunctions against the federal rule are “overbroad.”
“To be sure, this litigation is still unfolding, and respondents might eventually show injuries from the other portions of the rule,” wrote Sotomayor. “If so, those injuries might merit further relief.”
“For now, on the briefing and record currently before us, I would stay the preliminary injunctions except as to the three provisions above, in keeping with the traditional principle of equitable remedies that ‘relief afforded [to] the plaintiffs’ must not ‘be more burdensome than necessary to redress the complaining parties.’”
Earlier this year, the Department of Education under President Joe Biden announced new Title IX regulations, which were scheduled to go into effect this month. The new regulations defined sex discrimination as including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The expansion of the definition of “sex” prompted many states to file lawsuits against the Biden administration, with concerns including the imposing trans ideology on public schools.
Last month, U.S. District Judge John Broomes, a Trump appointee, issued a ruling in which he temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the new regulations.
“The Final Rule would, among other things, require schools to subordinate the fears, concerns, and privacy interests of biological women to the desires of transgender biological men to shower, dress, and share restroom facilities with their female peers,” wrote Broomes.
“Moreover, to expand sex discrimination to encompass ‘self-professed and potentially ever-changing gender identity is inconsistent with Title IX’s sex-separation dictates.'”
Implemented in 1972, Title IX was intended to prohibit schools receiving public funding from discriminating against students based on their sex.