A federal judge in Texas has temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s missive to all American public schools on transgender bathroom use, USA Today reports.
The federal directive was that transgender students be allowed to use school bathrooms and locker rooms they feel coincides with their chosen gender identity, instead of their sex at birth.
School districts nationwide are starting the first day of classes with news of the order, handed down by US District Judge Reed O’Connor.
The decision follows a move by Texas and 12 other states that challenged the Obama directive as unconstitutional at a hearing in Fort Worth last week.
Ken Paxton, Attorney General for Texas, expressed his support of the decision. The Republican said,
This president is attempting to rewrite the laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people, and is threatening to take away federal funding from schools to force them to conform.
He added that action had to be taken to protect school districts.
In May, the federal government made the controversial announcement on transgender bathroom guidelines. It came just days after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against North Carolina over a state law requiring people to use public bathrooms according to the sex stated on their birth certificates. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had compared the act to racial segregation policies, while Republicans argued that these are merely privacy safety measures.
Schools were not directly told that they would lose funding if they did not comply. But the federal government likewise did not rule out the possibility in court documents submitted in July, saying that schools on federal funding are “clearly on notice” that they must follow anti-discrimination rules. Texas gets around $10 billion in government funds for education.
The lawsuit was filed in May by the states of Texas, Alabama, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Georgia and Utah. Republican governors of Kentucky, Maine, and Mississippi also joined the suit, along with a small school district in Arizona.
