After nearly four years of leftist governance, Americans know the Biden administration habitually plays fast and loose with the law. This habit has been especially egregious in education, where the administration hopes to parlay the 2020 Supreme Court case on employment discrimination, Bostock v. Clayton County, into authority for new federal regulations under Title IX, a law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Not only are the new regulations legally dubious, but they also defy common sense as they would force girls to share school bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms with boys.
Fortunately, the new regulations recently hit a major roadblock when federal courts in Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, and Texas issued preliminary injunctions against them, with additional injunctions in other courts likely to follow. These courts correctly rejected the Biden administration’s argument that Bostock creates some equivalence between hiring and firing employees and showering in high school locker rooms.
On the day he was inaugurated, President Biden directed all federal agencies to revise their policies to reflect the reasoning of the Bostock decision. Bostock held that the prohibition on employment discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because of an individual’s sex includes terminating an employee simply for being gay or transgender. The court concluded that under the statute’s text, “sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role” in such termination decisions.
President Biden’s inaugural directive culminated in the issuance of the new regulations under Title IX. Litigation over the regulations centers principally on their redefinition of sex
