'Callous Attack': Trump DOJ Drops Protections for Transgender Students
President Donald Trump has dropped a pending legal challenge against an injunction that bans transgender students from using school facilities that correspond to their gender identity, ending an effort mounted by the Obama administration to protect LGBTQ youth.
The move was announced Friday, coming amid other signals that Republican-led states are seeking to dismantle recent gains for LGBTQ rights.
“This is a callous attack on hundreds of thousands of students who simply want to be their true selves and be treated with dignity while they work to get an education, just like every other student,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, which launched a resource center for impacted families in the wake of Trump’s election, said in a statement. “Transgender students thrive when treated equally, but too often, they are not.”
Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Justice (DOJ) held that Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, protects the rights of transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their gender identity, rather than their biological sex.
A lawsuit filed last year by more than a dozen Republican governors challenged the order, bolstered by an injunction handed down in August by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas, who wrote that allowing transgender students to use gender-consistent facilities threatens the privacy of their peers. The injunction applied nationwide.
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