Ten more states, led by Nebraska, filed a lawsuit last week against the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice on the directive the two agencies released nationwide to permit transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity.
Nebraska filed the suit in state federal court which challenges the enforcement route taken by the two agencies.
The Nebraska Attorney General Douglas Peterson wrote in an official press release: "Current state law and federal regulations allow schools to maintain separate facilities based upon sex. The recent action by these two federal agencies to require showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms be open to both sexes based solely on the student's choice, circumvents this established law by ignoring the appropriate legislative process necessary to change such a law."
The federal directive is currently to be enforced across all the states and districts, and those which do not comply with it are liable to lose millions of dollars in federal grants.
Eleven other states, led by Texas, had already filed a similar lawsuit against the two agencies in May regarding the same directive, but their lawsuit focuses more the interpretation of the word "sex" in Title IX, a non-discrimination clause in the Education Amendments of 1972. The federal directive states that the Department of Education and the Department of Justice will interpret the word "sex" in Title IX as "gender identity."
Last week, these states filed for a preliminary injunction in the same federal court, where the lawsuit was filed, to halt the implementation of the directive in the year 2017-18.
The states that sued the federal agencies together with Nebraska include Michigan, Arkansas, Montana, Ohio, South Dakota, Wyoming, South Carolina, Kansas, and North Dakota. This brings the total number of states to have filed the suit against the federal mandate at 21.
The Nebraska case will be heard by US District Court Judge John Gerrard, who had previously served as a justice in a state Supreme Court.
The conflict over bathroom access has gained a large momentum in the country, and last month, the Pentagon ended its ban on transgender people to serve in military.
In the year 2016, several states passed laws to define rules directing the use of restrooms by biological sex. And many of the state rules were challenged in courts by LGBTI-supporter groups to allow bathroom use in accordance to gender identity and not birth genders.
The federal directive is being opposed by many state lawmakers on the grounds that it poses a threat to the safety of children. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said that the mandate was "a radical social policy that raises serious safety concerns for school-age children."
Peterson also said that the directive ignores states and schools' right to handle the issues on an individual basis.
"It also supersedes local school districts' authority to address student issues on an individualized, professional and private basis. When a federal agency takes such unilateral action in an attempt to change the meaning of established law, it is incumbent upon those who want to maintain the rule of law to pursue legal clarity in federal court in order to enforce the rule of law," said attorney general in the official statement.
