This Thursday, new protections from discrimination for transgender and LGBTQ+ students at schools and colleges across the country will take effect – in the states where judges haven’t temporarily blocked enforcement. Courts have blocked federal protections in 21 states, and in hundreds of individual schools across the nation.
The tangle of incomplete protections results from Republican-led lawsuits in states across the country, against the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation. The regulation was issued in April, to be in place ahead of the 2024-2025 school year.
In many school districts, the law will be enforced in some schools, but not others.
“There aren’t many other parallels I can give you of two different sets of rules applying in the very same place, one school on one side of the street operating from a different playbook from a school on the other side of the street,” Brett Sokolow, chair of the Association of Title IX Administrators, told the AP.
The rights of transgender people, and especially transgender youth, are a hotly contested political battleground as trans visibility has increased. Republican-controlled states continue to attack gender-affirming health care for transgender minors; most Republican-led states have laws effectively banning gender-affirming health care for minors altogether. Many states have also enacted anti-trans bathroom laws, and laws which prevent young trans athletes from competing on sports teams aligned to their gender.
Biden’s administration aimed to safeguard rights of LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money. The rule was two years in the making and drew 240,000 responses — a record for the Education Department.
The U.S. Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court for permission to enforce components of the new rule that were not challenged by states, but it’s not clear when (or if) the justices might rule. Meanwhile, the ability for the federal government to enforce Title IX remains very much in question.
Federal courts have declared that the rule cannot be enforced in most of the Republican states that sued while the litigation continues, but in a surprising ruling just days ago, on Tuesday, a judge in Alabama ruled that enforcement will start across the South, in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.
