The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to reject the federal government’s bid to partially enforce its Title IX rule in 10 Republican-led states.
In a ruling handed down on Aug. 16, the high court left intact two separate lower court orders that blocked the entirety of the rule in Louisiana and nine other states that challenged it.
At the center of the disputes are three provisions, which include one declaring that the existing federal law against sex-based discrimination in education settings also prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The rule also addresses gendered pronouns and sex-separate spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower areas, clarifying that schools and colleges could lose federal funding if they don’t address students by their preferred pronouns or allow them to use facilities corresponding to their gender identity.
The federal government had asked the Supreme Court to partially lift those orders, a relief that would sever the three key provisions while allowing the other unchallenged parts of the rule to go into effect.
Four justices would have let part of the rule take effect, but the full bench agreed that the key changes the federal government has sought to implement, including the re-definition of “sex-based discrimination” to include gender identity and the restrictions on maintaining sex-separated spaces, should remain blocked.
“All Members of the Court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity,” the justices said in their unsigned opinion.
The rule took effect Aug. 1, but only in less than half of all states. Federal judges have blocked it in 26 states as legal challenges play out in court.
The battles that reached the nation’s highest court involved two groups of states. One case was brought by Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Idaho, and numerous Louisiana school districts. The other was filed by Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia and an association of Christian educators.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who leads the four-state lawsuit, called the rule a federal overreach that would undermine Title IX’s protection of female students and employees.
“Schools now have to change the way they behave and the way they speak, and whether they can have private spaces for little girls or women,” she said when announcing the lawsuit. “It is enormously invasive, and it is much more than a suggestion; it is a mandate that well exceeds their statutory authority.”
Meanwhile, in seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court, the U.S. Department of Justice argued that the lower court’s injunctions are “grossly overbroad” because “dozens” of the rule’s provisions unrelated to gender identity were also blocked.
“The district court’s injunction would block the department from implementing dozens of provisions of an important rule effectuating Title IX, a vital civil rights law protecting millions of students against sex discrimination,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the requests.
The court’s majority, however, ruled that Prelogar had failed to show that the bulk of the new regulation could be separated from the three challenged provisions.
“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,” they wrote.
Four members of the high court dissented over blocking the entire rule.
“Those injunctions are overbroad,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the partial dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“By blocking the government from enforcing scores of regulations that [challengers] never challenged and that bear no apparent relationship to [challengers’] alleged injuries, the lower courts went beyond their authority to remedy the discrete harms alleged here,” she wrote.
