A federal judge in Alabama on Tuesday refused to block President Joe Biden’s Title IX rewrite which expands protections to include gender identity, contrasting the rulings in six other courts around the country.
Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Annemarie Axon denied the preliminary injunction requested by four southern states to halt the enforcement of the new Title IX rules that go into effect on Thursday, which introduce federal protections against discrimination for LGBT students based on “gender identity.” The rules have already been blocked in 21 states amid ongoing litigation involving more than half of the U.S. in ten separate lawsuits, according to NBC News.
“Plaintiffs have failed to ‘clearly’ establish that they are entitled to the ‘extraordinary and drastic remedy’ that is a preliminary injunction,” the judge stated in the 122-page ruling. “Although Plaintiffs may dislike the Department’s rules, they have failed to show a substantial likelihood of success in proving the Department’s rulemaking was unreasonable or not reasonably explained under APA’s deferential arbitrary-or-capricious standard.”
The lawsuit was filed in May on behalf of the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina against the U.S. Department of Education and the Secretary of Education in the Northern District of Alabama, alleging the Biden administration overstepped its authority in redefining the federal law and that it violates the Administrative Procedure Act. The plaintiffs requested a preliminary injunction stating that allowing the rule to go into effect would “inflict immediate and irreparable harm on students, states, and schools.”
Biden introduced the rule change in a January 2021 executive order and later released a final rule in April, which was immediately met with legal challenges. Opponents argue that the rules would allegedly consider it harassment to state that there are only two genders or that individuals cannot change genders, according to a separate lawsuit challenging the rules.
The U.S. Department of Education and the plaintiffs’ legal council did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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