The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has ruled that the Biden administration cannot enforce its expanded federal protections for transgender students in the 26 states that have asked to block them while ongoing court challenges to the rules play out.
The Biden administration unveiled its revisions to Title IX, the federal anti-discrimination measures that protect students, in April 2024. While the revised rules expanded protections for trans students — including the right to use gendered facilities at school that match their gender identities and the right to be addressed by their proper name and pronouns — they did not include protections for trans student athletes from sports bans. (In March, sources from within the Biden administration said that the president planned to wait until after the election to address the issue of protections for trans athletes, fearing that the matter “seems to be too much of a hot topic” for an election year, as one anonymous source told The Washington Post.)
Subsequently, 26 states signed onto lawsuits challenging the changes to Title IX and requested a preliminary injunction against the rule change within their juridstictions. In July, a Kansas judge ruled in favor of those injunctions and additionally expanded the order to cover any school attended by members of the conservative organizations Young America’s Foundation, Female Athletes United, and Moms for Liberty, all of which joined the Kansas lawsuit as plaintiffs. According to Inside Higher Ed, that meant that the Title IX rules were temporarily blocked at 670 institutions across 50 states and territories. There are eight concurrent lawsuits against Biden’s Title IX rules, per Education Week.
In July, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the Supreme Court to take emergency action to restore the new Title IX rules in states where they had been blocked. While the new Title IX rules went into effect elsewhere on August 1, the Friday ruling from SCOTUS determined whether the Biden administration could enforce those rules in states that have sued to block them. The Court voted 5-4 in favor of granting the injunctions, stating that the government had not “provided this Court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions.”
But in a partially dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing on behalf of herself, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, called the injunctions “overbroad.” Under the preliminary injunctions, all of Biden’s revisions to Title IX are blocked, not just the parts that have to do with trans students, such as a portion that mandates that schools cannot retaliate against students for filing a Title IX complaint. “Those provisions (like many others in the Rule) do not reference gender identity discrimination or hostile environment harassment and bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries,” Sotomayor wrote.
In a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union, Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the organization’s Women’s Rights Project, said, “These lawsuits are using attacks on trans kids as a way to roll back other rights for women and girls.”
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