Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said that his state wouldn’t comply with new rules intended to prevent discrimination against LGBTQ+ students.
“Florida rejects Joe Biden’s attempt to rewrite Title IX,” he said in a video posted to social media. “We will not comply, and we will fight back.”
At issue are Title IX rules released by the Department of Education earlier this month that forbid discriminatory and harassing behavior against LGBTQ+ students. Title IX bans discrimination on the basis of sex, and the Biden administration based the rules on the legal argument that it is impossible to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people without taking sex into account, making anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination a form of sex-based discrimination. The Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton Co. decision relied on the same reasoning, but that case only applied to workplace discrimination.
The new Title IX rules do not address the issue of trans student-athletes and what teams they can play on, with two unnamed sources telling the Washington Post that President Joe Biden wanted to avoid the issue during an election year. Still, DeSantis brought the issue up anyway in his video.
“We are not gonna let Joe Biden try to inject men into women’s activities,” DeSantis said. “We are not gonna let Joe Biden undermine the rights of parents, and we are not gonna let Joe Biden abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us here in Florida.”
DeSantis isn’t the first state elected official to call on schools to defy the federal guidelines. Louisiana’s Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley told schools to ignore the federal government. He said that the rules would “likely conflict” with two bills in the legislature: one allowing teachers to misgender and deadname trans students and a second forbidding discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in all grade levels.
Republican officials in South Carolina and Oklahoma have also spoken out against the rules. South Carolina Schools Superintendent Ellen Weaver wrote a letter to school districts this week that banning anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in schools “would rescind 50 years of progress & equality of opportunity by putting girls and women at a disadvantage in the educational arena.”
ADF, an anti-LGBTQ+ legal group, has pledged to take legal action against the new rules, saying that they “ignore biological reality” and will harm women’s sports.
DeSantis has supported and implemented numerous laws attacking the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, including banning discussions of their identities in schools, banning gender-affirming health care for trans youth, and banning trans youth from participating in school sports.
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