Moms for Liberty sues DOE for their children to have the right to misgender trans classmates

The anti-LGBTQ+ group Moms for Liberty has joined the more than 20 Republican-led states currently suing the administration of President Joe Biden for the right to discriminate against transgender kids in school.

The hate group has joined a lawsuit led by the states of Alaska, Kansas, Utah, and Wyoming against the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Related: Mississippi governor signs bill to let cis people sue trans people if they use the bathroom

He called equal rights for trans people “kooky” in a statement on the new law.

The suit targets the Biden Administration’s newly announced Title IX rules mandating anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students. The rules interpret Title IX, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in education, as a legal protection against anti-LGBTQ+ school policies. In particular, the rules require schools to let trans students use names, pronouns, restrooms, and other facilities that match their gender identity.

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With these rules, any school that receives federal funding will no longer be able to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. This could affect states and school districts with policies outing LGBTQ+ students to their parents or banning trans students from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender. The new rules could also give students who face discrimination recourse in federal courts.

The lawsuit claims the federal government is unlawfully seeking “to politicize our country’s educational system to conform to the radical ideological views of the Biden administration and its allies” and, as such, is failing “to protect women and girls from discrimination in education.”

It refers to “transgender ideology” as a “left-wing fad” that has nothing to do with Title IX and “robs girls and women of their opportunity to participate in their school’s education programs and activities, especially athletics, by forcing them to compete with biological males.”

While GOP attorneys general are up in arms about the effect the rules will have on athletics, the rules do not actually discuss transgender student-athletes and which teams they can play on. The DOE is reportedly planning to issue a separate rule regarding what Title IX means for sports participation in the coming future.

Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich claimed in a press release, “Every parent in America is about to see biological boys on girls’ sports teams and in girls’ locker rooms, and gender identity and sexual orientation will be taught in every classroom across America, whether parents like it or not. They won’t have a choice.”

“Private conversations will happen between school officials and minor school children about changing their gender, and if parents try to fight back, they will be the ones in the wrong. This is a huge shift in policy that effectively mandates gender ideology in schools.”

The group also whined that the new rules won’t let students misgender their classmates, citing several examples regarding the children of Moms for Liberty Members. In one instance, a Moms for Liberty member’s two children have been asked by their school to stop using incorrect pronouns when referring to their trans classmate.

“This action by a school administrator confirms our fears that students and parents will be asked to conform with extreme gender ideology politics, even if they do not align with their personal beliefs,” Justice and Descovich’s statement adds.

The new rules are set to take effect on August 1 and invalidate numerous anti-transgender policies developed under former President Donald Trump. The Trump administration spent four years fighting against the legal argument that laws that ban discrimination “based on sex” ban anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, particularly in schools.

In 2017, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued guidance to schools saying that Title IX did not protect LGBTQ+ students, shortly after she and Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked a guidance from the administration of former President Barack Obama that said the opposite. 

The Biden administration had promised to present the newly unveiled rules by January, but the DOE said its release was delayed due to an unprecedented number of over 240,000 comments submitted during the new rules’ 30-day public response period.

The language in Moms for Liberty’s arguments echoes that of many attorneys general who have filed lawsuits to fight the rule.

In a press conference, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) invoked the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as justification for his fight to discriminate against trans youth.

“Title IX has protected women for 50 years,” Skrmetti said, as reported by The Tennessean. “It is a law… built around the idea of men and women, sex binary. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, enduring differences between the sexes necessitate things like separate bathrooms, separate locker rooms, separate living facilities, separate sports teams. This is something that our law has recognized for decades.”

The rules, however, do not suggest that schools eliminate single-gender spaces. Rather, they simply require schools to include everyone who identifies as a boy in boys’ spaces and everyone who identifies as a girl in girls’ spaces.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R) said the rules are designed to “federally coerce schools into indoctrinating students in gender identity theories popular among progressive parents but that ignore science.”

Conservative parent organizations have also spoken out against the new rules. Fifty-three groups signed a letter led by Parents Defending Education (PDE) claiming trans inclusivity “poses a grave threat to the safety and opportunities of women and girls and thwarts students’ First Amendment rights” by forcing them to use accurate pronouns for trans and nonbinary students even if they don’t want to.

In contrast to the conservative backlash, LGBTQ+ organizations have celebrated the announcement, though they also say more is needed.

In a statement both celebrating and criticizing the newly unveiled rules, the National Women’s Law Center wrote, “As we celebrate this milestone, we recognize that this regulation does not go far enough in making the law’s protections clear for all student-athletes.” The statement was signed by 22 other organizations, including LGBTQ+ advocacy groups like GLSEN, the Human Rights Campaign, PFLAG National, and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Out gay Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA) wrote, “The Education Department and Biden Administration showed real courage today, delivering on a long-held promise to ensure that the federal government does more to protect all Americans—especially LGBTQ Americans—from discrimination. This groundbreaking rule is a major victory, but we still have much to do. We need to enshrine and expand its protections by passing the Equality Act because for too many Americans, their rights and protections depend on the zip code they live in.”

Trans journalist Erin Reed has said that the Biden Administration, DOE, and DOJ should conduct civil rights investigations into anti-trans states to help create judicial precedent and enforcement against transphobic policies that harm trans individuals and their families.

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