Court Strikes Down Biden’s Title IX Trans Overhaul Nationwide

A U.S. district court struck down President Joe Biden’s queer theory rewrite of Title IX nationwide on Thursday, blocking his administration from attempting to change the definition of “sex” to include claimed “gender identities.”

Kentucky U.S. District Court Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves, an appointee of President George W. Bush, blocked the Biden Department of Education’s new Title IX rules. Those rules would have forced schools to allow boys in girls’ private spaces like restrooms and locker rooms, required teachers to refer to children with “preferred pronouns,” and made girls sleep in the same facilities as boys on events like overnight field trips. The Biden rules also stripped the due process rights of persons accused of sexual assault on college campuses, bringing back Obama-era “kangaroo courts” designed to give life to false accusations.

“It is abundantly clear that discrimination on the basis of sex means discrimination on the basis of being a male or female,” Reeves wrote. “Expanding the meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ turns Title IX on its head. … The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex — throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”

Over the summer, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed injunctions on the Title IX rule to remain in 26 states where several lawsuits brought by different coalitions were successful in rendering the rewrite null and void. One federal judge in Louisiana struck down the rewrite, referring to it as an “abuse of power” and a “threat to democracy.”

The Thursday decision has nationwide implications, however, because in a motion for summary judgment, the plaintiff states requested that the court exercise the power granted by the Administrative Procedures Act to vacate agency rules that are “(A) arbitrary, capricious, an
abuse of discretion, or otherwise not by law; (B) contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity; [or] in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of a statutory right,” Reeves wrote.

Reeves cited several grounds for striking down the rules, including free speech concerns with having federal education funding be tied to compelling teachers and others to use pronouns that do not align with a student’s sex, but rather their claimed gender.

“The plaintiffs reasonably fear that teachers’ (and others’) speech concerning gender issues or their failure to use gender-identity-based pronouns would constitute harassment under the Final Rule,” he wrote. “Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner.”

The judge noted that even though some portions of the rule are not in and of themselves violative, the entire basis of Title IX rests on the definition of sex, and that the portions of the rule challenged in the lawsuit “fatally taint the entire rule,” including the due process sections.

The Biden administration repeatedly cited the U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, in which Justice Neil Gorsuch bizarrely allowed claimed “gender identity” in the definition of “sex” as it pertains to employment discrimination under Title VII. Using that as fuel, Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office directing the entire federal government to apply that framework to all of its decision-making.

The decision comes as a Senate bill designed to bar men from competing in women’s sports is set for a vote in the coming weeks.