The Biden administration’s directives were part of a widespread effort by the White House to rescind or revise many polices of the Trump administration that restricted transgender rights.
In the 2020 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Before that decision, it was legal in more than half of the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender.
The state attorneys general had argued in their case that the authority on these issues “properly belongs to Congress, the States, and the people.” In siding with the states, Judge Atchley wrote that their “sovereign power to enforce their own legal code is hampered” by the government’s guidance on civil rights law and that the states faced “substantial pressure to change their state laws as a result.”
The judge also wrote that the Biden administration’s directives went beyond what the Supreme Court ruling mandated.
Jennifer C. Pizer, the acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, a national civil rights organization, said in a statement that the decision showed “a disturbingly blinkered view of this area of law,” adding that many federal court decisions established that federal sex discrimination standards applied in this case and that the judge overlooked the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/us/judge-blocks-biden-lgbt-student-rules.html
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