Biden administration’s LGBTQ+ education protections upheld by Trump judge in major victory

A federal judge in Alabama refused to block the Biden administration’s new protections against anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in schools, a break with five other judges who have blocked the protections from going into effect.

U.S. District Judge Annemarie Axon in Birmingham, who former President Donald Trump appointed, rejected the arguments made by four states led by Alabama that challenged the new rules from the U.S. Department of Education.

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The new rules say that federal laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sex also apply to gender identity. Under the rules, harassing LGBTQ+ students, such as deadnaming or misgendering trans students, is a form of sex-based discrimination, which is banned under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. It also changes the procedures schools must use in investigating accusations of student misconduct.

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In a 122-page ruling, Axon rejected the premise of the arguments against the DOE’s guidelines. “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.”

Twenty-six Republican-led states have sued to block the DOE rules. In addition, six other judges have blocked the rule from being enforced in 21 states pending the resolution of underlying lawsuits.

Federal appeals courts have refused to stay two of these injunctions, affecting ten states, pending the Biden administration’s appeals. Last week, the administration requested that the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily set aside those decisions.

Axon drew on a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision,  Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that the ban against workplace sex-based discrimination contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to LGBTQ+ workers under the argument that it’s impossible to discriminate on the basis of LGBTQ+ identity without taking sex into account.

Axon said in her ruling that Title IX does not define sex as limited to biological sex, making the Department of Education’s rules reasonable.

“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 ruling is a break with other judges who have ruled in lawsuits brought to block the DOE rules. Earlier this month, a judge in Kansas said that the Title IX ruling does not apply to LGBTQ+ students, blocking the enforcement of protections in Alaska, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming. Likewise, in June, two judges in Texas also blocked the protections, saying that Title IX only applies to cisgender females.

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