Guidelines on Transgender Students Remain in Place – for Now
Many public schools are preparing to begin a new school year for the first time since the Obama administration issued guidelines on treatment of transgender students. Thirteen states have asked a federal judge to halt the directive, but after a hearing Friday in Fort Worth, no action or ruling has yet been decided. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor is expected to issue an order soon, the Houston Chronicle reports.
The lawsuit filed in May, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was joined by Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, as well as the governors of Maine, Mississippi, and Kentucky.
Paxton is arguing the Obama administration has thrust “radical changes” on the nation with the introduction of the guidelines. Those guidelines, effectively, support federal court rulings of recent years.
“Defendants have conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights,†the complaint reads, according to the Amarillo Globe-News.Â
Paxton’s lawsuit is separate from another lawsuit filed in July by ten other states, including Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
Meanwhile, 12 states and the District of Columbia filed an amicus brief last month on behalf of in favor of the guidelines. They include, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
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“Schools were not explicitly told to comply or lose federal funds,” the Albuquerque Journal notes. “But the Obama administration also didn’t rule out that possibility in court documents filed in July.”
The letter introducing the transgender guidelines, released in May by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, states that it constitutes as significant guidance, meaning that no additional legal requirements have been put into place as a result of the directive. It simply states that a student’s gender identity should be respected and protected under Title IX and lays out specific areas where this applies, including restrooms and locker rooms, single-sex classes, and housing accommodations.
The rights of transgender students have been a point of contention around the country this year, with notable cases involving two Kansas bills that would have given cisgender students financial incentive to sue their schools if they saw a trans student in the bathroom, a sweeping North Carolina law that restricts bathroom use across the state, and the recent developments in a Virginia case preventing Gavin Grimm from using the boys’ restroom at his school.
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School Official in Suit Against Obama Trans Guidance: ‘I Don’t Believe in the Term Transgender’
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