CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is co-leading a six-state group suing the federal Department of Education over what they call its “dangerous overhaul” of Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act.
Morrisey says the changes would harm West Virginia students, families and schools.
The lawsuit was filed April 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Joining West Virginia and Tennessee in filing the complaint are Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia.
“The Biden administration’s Title IX revisions will end sex-based protections for biological women in sports, plain and simple,” Morrisey said. “This marks a retreat from the progress women have made.”
The Title IX federal statute was signed into law on June 23, 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.
“For 50 years, Title IX has helped equalize women’s access to educational facilities and programs by barring discrimination based on sex by federally funded schools,” Morrisey’s office said in a press release about the lawsuit. “At the same time, because of the enduring physical differences between men and women, Title IX has always allowed the sex-segregated spaces — like bathrooms and locker rooms — that are ubiquitous across the nation.
“Now, in the guise of confronting ‘gender identity discrimination,’ DOE has finalized a rule essentially abolishing sex-based distinctions in educational activities and programs and forcing states like West Virginia to accept radical gender ideology in their schools. And DOE has done so in blatant defiance of Congress’s repeated refusal to extend Title IX’s protections to anything other than sex.”
If the DOE’s changes to Title IX are allowed to stand, Morriey says West Virginia schools could allow males self-identifying as female — in every grade from preschool through college — to use girls’ and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, play on girls’ and women’s sports teams, and access other female-only activities and spaces or risk losing billions in federal funding.
He says the Title IX mandate would “upend schools’ long-lawful practices protecting student privacy, unfairly undermine women’s academic and athletic achievements and related advancement in society, and punish states for following their laws.” He says the DOE lacks the authority to implement such changes, and federal bureaucrats have “no right to fundamentally change what it means to be a man or a woman.”
“Title IX is simple and straightforward — it’s about basic fairness,” Morrisey said. “The Biden administration’s insistence on redefining sex in Title IX ignores science and could walk back decades of progress for women in education and sports.
“We must honor and defend the success of Title IX to guarantee its benefits flow to the generations of girls and women to come.”
Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti agreed.
“The U.S. Department of Education has no authority to let boys into girls’ locker rooms,” he said. “In the decades since its adoption, Title IX has been universally understood to protect the privacy and safety of women in private spaces like locker rooms and bathrooms.
“Under this radical and illegal attempt to rewrite the statute, if a man enters a woman’s locker room and a woman complains that makes her uncomfortable, the woman will be subject to investigation and penalties for violating the man’s civil rights. Federal bureaucrats have no power to rewrite laws passed by the people’s elected representatives, and I expect the courts will put a stop to this unconstitutional power grab.”
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky case number 2:24-cv-00072