Texas is suing the U.S. Department of Education for threatening to withhold as much as $6 billion in federal funds from schools that don’t adopt “transgender” ideology.
The Office of the Attorney General filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Biden Administration’s interpretation of Title IX, a federal statute enacted in 1972 to protect girls and women that prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex” in educational institutions.
In 2021, Biden’s Department of Education issued guidance to schools expanding “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
According to the lawsuit, the new interpretation of Title IX seeks to “radically transform educational institutions” by equating sex with gender identity or “transgender” status.
The Department of Education along with Department of Justice, which are both defendants in the lawsuit, threatened to investigate schools that decline to adopt concepts promoted by the extremist “transgender” movement.
Schools risk losing federal funding if they “misgender” students, fail to use “preferred pronouns,” or maintain sex-separated facilities and sports teams.
“Texas is challenging this blatant attempt to misuse federal regulatory power to force K-12 schools, colleges, and universities in our state to accept and implement ‘transgender’ ideology—in violation of state law—by misusing the Title IX statute to threaten the withholding of federal education funds,” the OAG said in a statement Wednesday. “The Administration’s unlawful guidance could put at risk over $6 billion in federal funding that supports Texas K-12 and higher education institutions.”
The complaint notes that Biden bureaucrats are “weaponizing” Title IX in tandem with private entities like the left-of-center ACLU, which are using the federal government’s new guidance documents to intimidate school districts with threats of lawsuits as well as “provoke” the agencies to “use their powers of investigation and enforcement to pressure Texas to change its laws and policies.”
That the Defendants intend to use their new twist on Title IX to force dissenters from their new gender orthodoxy to bend the knee is no idle speculation. On December 6, 2022, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether Granbury Independent School District had created a hostile environment for students based on “gender identity.”
It initiated the investigation based on a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas which relied upon the Notice, Letter, and Fact Sheet as the basis for its allegations of discrimination.
ACLU-Texas lodged similar complaints against Frisco ISD and Keller ISD.
With Ken Paxton temporarily sidelined as attorney general during his impeachment proceedings this summer, some feared that his office might stop fighting back against federal overreach.
However, the OAG noted that this is the 50th lawsuit Texas has filed against the Biden Administration.
The full complaint can be read here.
