Twenty States Sue Administration For Saying They Can’t Discriminate Against LGBTQ Students

Continuing the 2021 trend of conservatives mercilessly attacking trans children, a coalition of 20 states (with Tennessee leading the way) sued the Biden administration Tuesday, because it has said it will protect the rights of LGBTQ students to get an education free from discrimination.

According to the Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III (R), Biden and the administration have “misconstrued the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision by claiming its prohibition of discrimination applies to locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms under Title IX and Title VII and biological men who identify as women competing in women’s sports.”

AG Slatery is referring to the Biden administration’s June declaration that banning discrimination under the pretense of “sex” extends to LGBTQ students as well. The letter, sent to schools and issued by the Department of Education, explicitly referenced the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v Clayton County, which deemed it is illegal to fire someone or deny them employment for being LGBTQ under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Department of Education says that this decision extends to Title IX, the court finding it is “impossible to discriminate” against a queer or trans person without discriminating against that individual based on sex.

The declaration came in a year that saw more than 100 anti-LGBTQ bills—many targeting trans youth—introduced to state legislatures, with a handful moving forward and passing. It’s created a near-constant strain between Republican-led states and the administration, which has made it clear it’s willing to take legal action to protect trans youth.

Slatery and other attorneys general say the administration changed the law, and that Bostock specifically looks at employment practices with nothing to do with trans student athletes.

The states are suing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Education (DOE) saying the DOE issued unauthorized guidance to schools when they said they couldn’t discriminate against trans student and said the EEOC went beyond its mandate when it issued guidance that preventing  a trans employee from using the restroom of their gender or forcing them to follow a dress code of their sex assigned at birth is discrimination.

The lawsuit also asserts that these 20 states can be sued if people use the reasoning put worth by the EEOC and DOE because these states have laws that inherently discriminate against LGBTQ people. For example, the administration is participating in lawsuits against West Virginia and Arkansas that challenge their anti-trans laws, so this red-state lawsuit is calling on the court to resolve the incompatible policies of the republicans state leaders and the democratic White House.

The complaint doesn’t expand much more on why the 20 states want to maintain their discriminatory laws (though there’s plenty of references to trans girls as “biological men”), but the focus is on the process, saying the EEOC and DOE lack the authority to interpret Bostock as banning anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

Tennessee was joined by 19 states in the lawsuit: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.