Federal Court Enjoins Title IX Transgender Guidance

This week, a federal court in Texas issued a preliminary injunction that bars the Department of Education from enforcing the interpretation of Title IX that is contained in its May 2016 guidance regarding transgender students. In that guidance, the DoE affirmed that discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of gender identity and transgender status, and that as a result, institutions receiving federal funding must permit transgender students to access sex-specific facilities and programs that correspond to their gender identities rather than their birth-assigned sex.

The state of Texas is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that is challenging the DoE's interpretation. Yesterday, the federal district court granted the plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction, which means that while litigation is pending, the Department cannot insist that school districts and universities refrain from discriminating against transgender students, or revoke the federal funding from those who do.  The standard that the courts use to determine if a preliminary injunction is appropriate primarily considers whether the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits, and that the balance of harm tips in their favor.  In addition, the court had to address several threshold issues regarding the justiciability of the case including the standing of the plaintiffs and the ripeness of the claim.

Substantive invalidity.  One key issue on which the court thinks the plaintiffs will likely prevail is their argument that existing regulation does not support the agency's position contained in the guidance.  The court disagreed with the agency's position that the regulatory ban on "sex" discrimination, subject to exceptions for sex-segregated facilities like bathrooms and dormitories, includes discriminating against transgender individuals by denying them access to facilities that are consistent with their gender identities. According to the court, "[i]t cannot be disputed that the plain meaning of the term sex as used in § 106.33 when it was enacted by DoE following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth."

I think that even if conceded, that argument misses the point. It is possible to view transgender exclusion as sex-based treatment in the sense that a transgender individual's [anatomical, birth-assigned] sex is being viewed in relation to their gender identity.  Individuals whose sex and gender identities align can use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, while individuals whose sex do not align cannot the bathroom that matches their gender identity. Sex, even in its "plain meaning" attributed by the court, is still a factor being taken into account. An interpretation that this manner of discrimination is already prohibited by the regulations is therefore a permissible one for the agency to make.

Procedural invalidity. The court also concluded that the plaintiffs will likely prevail on its argument that the DoE should have used statutorily prescribed notice and comment procedures. When an agency promulgates a binding regulation, it must publish the rule in essentially draft form, get public input, and address the public's comments in the final version of the rule. However, when an agency issues sub-regulatory guidance that merely clarifies or interprets an existing regulation, it may legally bypass the notice-and-comment procedural requirements.

The court disputed DoE's classification of the guidance as an interpretive rule, concluding that it "de facto regulation" that should have gone through notice and comment, a conclusion that turns on the court's sense that the guidance was meant to be binding and not discretionary. But a key characteristic of an interpretive rule is whether, without it, the agency would have the legal basis on which to bring an enforcement action to the same effect. Here, existing regulations prohibit treating individuals differently on the basis of sex, subject to the exception for sex-segregated facilities like bathrooms and dormitories. Even if the guidance had never been published, the DoE could have advanced this position in the context of an enforcement action. In fact, it did that very thing.  I think the court missed an opportunity to discuss an important characteristic of an interpretive rule, the fact of an already-existing basis for enforcement. 

Ripeness. One other thing that surprised me about the court's opinion was the standard that it used to determine that the case was ripe. Here, the plaintiffs are asking the court to throw out the Department's guidance before it has been enforced against any funding recipient. According to a Supreme Court decision called Abbott Labs, such pre-enforcement review is only appropriate when the questions raised by the case are fit for review and that withholding of review creates a hardship for the plaintiff.  But notwithstanding this two-part test, the Texas court seems only concerned about fitness and not about hardship. In Abbott Labs, the drug manufacturer-plaintiffs challenging a USDA labeling requirement satisfied the hardship requirement because there were high costs associated both with compliance and with non-compliance. Are the schools in Texas and other plaintiff states in a similar double bind?  The cost of compliance is just to let transgender kids use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.  The percentage of students who are transgender is exceedingly small, maybe 1% or less.  For schools that do have transgender students in their population, it is possible to comply with the guidance without incurring any cost at all, which could not be said for the drug manufacturers in Abbott Labs.  Even the cost of non-compliance is distinguishable from that in Abbott Labs, where the Court was not only concerned with the possibility of incurring fines for mislabeled drugs, but also the particular cost to a drug manufacturer's reputation that come from being subject to an enforcement action.  This extra consideration should be necessary, since the penalties that result from the enforcement action itself are always ripe for review. And it doesn't seem to be present here.  In light of the court's omission of a key component of the ripeness test, I am guessing this issue will be an important one on appeal.