A federal judge in Alabama on Tuesday refused to block the Biden administration from enforcing new anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students in four Republican-led states, breaking with six other judges who have said the rules are invalid.
U.S. District Judge Annemarie Axon in Birmingham in a 122-page ruling rejected various arguments that the four states led by Alabama made in challenging U.S. Department of Education regulations that say a federal law barring sex discrimination in education extends to gender identity.
The regulations also bar harassment against LGBTQ students, such as refusing to use a transgender student's preferred pronouns, and changes the procedures schools must use in investigating accusations of student misconduct.
Axon, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump, said the claims by the states and several conservative groups were conclusory and not backed by court precedent.
"Although Plaintiffs may dislike the Department’s rules, they have failed to show a substantial likelihood of success in proving the Department’s rulemaking was unreasonable or not reasonably explained," Axon wrote.
A total of 26 Republican-led states have sued over the rule, which is set to take effect on Thursday. Six other judges have blocked the rule from being enforced in 21 of those states pending the outcome of underlying lawsuits.
Federal appeals courts have declined to stay two of those rulings involving 10 states pending the Biden administration's appeals. The administration last week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily set aside those decisions.
The office of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, and the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Education Department when it adopted the rule in April said it clarified that the prohibition against sex-based discrimination in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 also includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Education Department said that a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that a ban against workplace sex discrimination contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covered gay and transgender workers, applied to Title IX.
Courts often rely on interpretations of Title VII when analyzing Title IX, as both laws bar discrimination on the basis of sex.
But Alabama and the other states challenging the rule say Bostock was narrower than the department claimed, and that the agency lacked the power to redefine the scope of Title IX protections.
The states in Tuesday's lawsuit, which also include Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, also claimed that the rule would bar schools from separating bathrooms and locker rooms by sex and force them to either violate their own contrary laws or forego federal education funding.
Axon on Tuesday said nothing in Title IX limits the definition of sex to biological sex, and that the Education Department's interpretation of the law was reasonable in light of the Bostock decision. She also said the department had addressed concerns about bathrooms and other issues in its rulemaking.
"At their core, Plaintiffs’ arguments are not that the Department exceeded the zone of reasonableness, but rather, that Plaintiffs disagree as a policy matter," she wrote.
The case is Alabama v. Cardona, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, No. 7:24-cv-00533.
For the states: Edmund LaCour of the Alabama attorney general's office; and Cameron Norris of Consovoy McCarthy
For the Department of Education: Rebecca Kopplin of the U.S. Department of Justice
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