In Tennessee, one U.S. District Court has officially banned those within the Biden administration from trying to enforce their policy that would have forced some states to let athletes who identify as transgender play on the sports teams of the gender with which they identify.
This past Friday, one U.S. District Judge, Charles Atchley Jr., issued a ruling in favor of a group of 20 state attorneys general who slammed the Biden administration with a lawsuit back in August of 2021, reported the Associated Press. The group of attorneys general made the argument that two large federal agencies, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Education, were stepping extremely far outside of the power of their mandate from Congress by crafting new guidance that would have just been ignored existing and future gender laws at the state level.
To go along with its effects on transgender athletes, the Biden administration policy would have let people who identify as transgender to make use of the locker rooms and bathrooms of the opposite biological sex.
Back in June of 2021, DOE stated that any discrimination based upon someone’s gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The EEOC also put out a new release of its own for private businesses. Many of the states that were represented in the lawsuit had made laws that ran against those federal policies and made the argument that the court must issue an injunction, if only temporary, on the federal mandate at least until the lawsuit could make its way through the legal system.
“As demonstrated above, the harm alleged by Plaintiff States is already occurring — their sovereign power to enforce their own legal code is hampered by the issuance of Defendants’ guidance and they face substantial pressure to change their state laws as a result,” explained Atchley via his ruling on Friday.
The lawsuit was led by Tennessee’s Attorney General Herbert Slatery and they claimed that their justification for DOE’s and EEOC’s guidance was based on a false interpretation of Bostock v. Clayton County, which claimed that it was extremely discriminatory for any private business to hire or fire someone solely based on their gender identity or sexual orientation as part of Title VII.
“These agencies also 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, when the Supreme Court specifically said it was not deciding those issues in Bostock,” argued Slatery in the lawsuit from August 2021, reported Courthouse News at that time.
The lawsuit also claims that the Biden admin “purports to resolve highly controversial and localized issues such as … whether individuals may be compelled to use another person’s preferred pronouns. But the agencies have no authority to resolve those sensitive questions, let alone to do so by executive fiat without providing any opportunity for public participation.”
The attorneys general made the argument that the agencies they spoke of were “usurping authority that properly belongs to Congress, the States, and the people and to eliminate the nationwide confusion and upheaval that the agencies’ recent guidance has inflicted on States and other regulated entities.”