Ten states and Arizona Department of Education along with three individual school districts and state officials have sued the Obama administration over a recent directive allowing transgender students to use bathrooms in accordance with the gender they identify with.
The lawsuit says that the White House "conspired to turn workplace and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights."
The plaintiffs include the states of Alabama, Texas, West Virginia, Maine, Louisiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Georgia, Utah, Wisconsin, and governor of Arizona Paul Lepage. Harrold Independent School District (Texas) and Heber-Overgaard Unified School District also participated in the lawsuit.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that he got involved in the lawsuit after he met parents at a school district in Fort Worth, who were not in support of the directive due to concerns about safety of their children.
Harrold Independent School Board, one of the districts involved in the lawsuit, said that they will not comply with the directive. Superintendent David Thweatt says his school has no transgender students, and parents were worried about abuse of the ordinance.
"It's not moot because it was thrusted upon us by the federal government," Thweatt said, "or we were going to risk losing our federal funding."
Paxton said that Texas was sympathetic to the "cause" of North Carolina which is not among the plaintiffs of this lawsuit.
The Department of Justice and the state of North Carolina have already sued each other in separate courts over the state's bathroom ordinance requiring individuals to use bathrooms according to their biological sex in all government facilities.
"We're taking the Obama admin to court. They're bypassing Congress, attempting to rewrite law & policies for the whole country, not just NC," Governor Pat McCrory wrote on Twitter.
US Attorney General Loretta Lynch called on McCrory to take back the limiting access bathroom ordinance which she said "discriminated" against transgender students.
"No student should ever have to go through the experience of feeling unwelcome at school or on a college campus," U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said in a statement. "We must ensure that our young people know that whoever they are or wherever they come from, they have the opportunity to get a great education in an environment free from discrimination, harassment and violence."
President Barack Obama commented on the bathroom policy for the first time when he said: "Anybody who has been in school, in high school, who has been a parent should realize that kids who are sometimes in the minority - kids who have a different sexual orientation or are transgender - are subject to a lot of bullying, potentially."
"They are vulnerable, and I think it's part of our obligation as a society to make sure everybody is treated fairly, and our kids are all loved and protected, and that their dignity is affirmed," he continued.
The lawsuit filed by McCrory had accused the federal government of "baseless and blatant overreach" in directing North Carolina to take back what he called "common sense policy."
