Twenty states have initiated a lawsuit against the Biden administration after the US Department of Education ordered schools to allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports teams.

In the suit filed in the US district court in Knoxville on Monday, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery and his counterparts in 19 other states ask a judge to allow them to separate restrooms, showers and locker rooms according to ‘biological sex’, the Daily Mail reported.

The suit also seeks for schools to be able to separate sports teams based on ‘biological sex’ and enforce dress codes as such, and not have to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.

‘All of this, together with the threat of withholding educational funding in the midst of a pandemic, warrants this lawsuit,’ Slatery said in a statement. 

The Education Department under President Joe Biden in June announced that discriminating based on a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity violated Title IX, a federal law with safeguards around sex discrimination within education.

Schools found to violate Title IX faced losing federal funds or a delay in receiving them.

The 20 states claim that the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which released a guidance on LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace, ‘have no authority to resolve those sensitive questions, let alone to do so by executive fiat without providing any opportunity for public participation’.

‘This case is about two federal agencies changing law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,’ Slatery said in his statement. ‘The agencies simply do not have that authority. But that has not stopped them from trying.’

The suit also states the agencies were ‘flouting procedural requirements in their rush to overreach’.

Besides Tennessee, the states in the suit are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia. They are all Republican-led states, except for three.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].

Source: Read Full Article