Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered his agencies to disregard the Biden administration’s “illegal dictate” on Title IX, joining other states in suing to block gender identity to the civil rights law.
Mr. Abbott said he instructed the Texas Education Agency to ignore the U.S. Education Department’s rule unveiled April 19 revamping Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in education.
“You have rewritten Title IX to force schools to treat boys as if they were girls and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity,” Mr. Abbott wrote in a Monday letter to President Biden. “This ham-handed effort to impose a leftist belief onto Title IX exceeds your authority as president.”
The Republican governor’s show of resistance comes amid a multistate pileup of lawsuits aimed at preventing the 52-year-old law intended to promote women’s equality from being leveraged for transgender women.
Four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho — filed a legal challenge Monday in Louisiana federal court, while Texas submitted a separate federal complaint.
Also Monday, four other states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina — joined three advocacy groups in filing a lawsuit in federal court in Alabama.
“Since taking office, Joe Biden has brazenly attempted to use federal funding to force radical gender ideology onto states that reject it at the ballot box,” said Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. “Now our schoolchildren are the target. The threat is that if Alabama’s public schools and universities do not conform, then the federal government will take away our funding. Rest assured, Biden will not be successful.”
Meanwhile, a coalition of six states — Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia — filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the rule in federal court in Kentucky.
The administration’s rule is intended to expand inclusion by extending Title IX’s anti-discrimination protection to transgender students, but critics argue it turns the law on its head by eliminating distinctions between men and women.
“Women and men are equal, but we are not the same,” said Riley Gaines, an ambassador for the right-of-center Independent Women’s Forum, one of the plaintiffs in the Alabama-led lawsuit.
“Sex does not equal gender identity, but according to the Biden administration’s illegal and discriminatory new Omnibus Title IX rule, it is perfectly acceptable to strip away the sole purpose of Title IX — to provide equal opportunity for women under the law,” she added.
The other groups joining the four-state lawsuit in Alabama are Parents Defending Education and Speech First.
Mr. Abbott said the rewrite also conflicts with a state law banning transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, while the department said the rule doesn’t address scholastic sports.
A separate rule-making on transgender athletic eligibility is expected to be released after the November election.
Congress wrote Title IX to protect women. Biden, with no authority to do so, rewrote Title IX to protect men who identify as women.
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 29, 2024
This tramples Texas laws that prohibit men in women’s sports.
I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore Biden’s illegal dictate. pic.twitter.com/4G1UXNGWKL
A DOE spokesperson said the department doesn’t comment on pending litigation, but defended the final rule, saying it was intended “to give complete effect to the Title IX statutory guarantee that no person experiences sex discrimination in federally funded education.”
“As a condition of receiving federal funds, all federally funded schools are obligated to comply with these final regulations and we look forward to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience,” the spokesperson added.
Biden’s rule, which drew a record 240,000 public comments on the Federal Register, is scheduled to take effect Aug. 1.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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