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(Jackson, Mississippi) Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed suit today challenging the Biden Administration’s attempt to transform Title IX into a prohibition against separate bathrooms, locker rooms, and other private spaces in education from elementary schools to colleges and universities and set up a framework to make female athletes compete with transgender athletes for spots on teams and awards in competitions. General Fitch joined the Attorneys General of Louisiana, Montana, and Idaho to stop the new Biden rule that fully follows Title IX’s purpose of promoting equal opportunities for girls in education and protecting the dignity of women in private spaces.
“Title IX has been a game-changer for generations of women,” said Attorney General Lynn Fitch, “For more than fifty years, it has given girls an opportunity to compete on a level playing field and offered them a fair chance to excel. The Biden Administration’s pursuit of an extremist political agenda here will destroy these important gains. What’s more, under this new rule, safe and private spaces for women to engage in healing, fellowship, and support will be torn away from them. The Administration’s legal theories are novel, at best, and they cut legal corners to push them through, and we intend to defeat this rule in the courts.”
The Attorneys General explain in their complaint, “The Final Rule prohibits single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms. The Final Rule likewise compels school officials both to use pronouns associated with a student’s claimed ‘gender identity’ and to force students to do so as well. And school officials should be careful about requesting documentation to verify the sincerity of a person’s claimed gender identity, the Department ominously warns, because that itself might violate the Final Rule. Moreover, although the Department tries to downplay the Rule’s impact on athletics – because the Department knows that extending its radical theory to athletics would be political suicide in an election year – the Rule cannot help but sound the death knell for female sports.”
In 2021, Mississippi passed the Fairness Act to protect girls’ sports, and the legislature currently has two bills in conference to further protect women’sprivacy, safety, and opportunity – SB 2753, the SAFER (Securing Areas for females Effectively and Responsibly) Act, and HB 1607, the Women’s Bill of rights. The complaint today notes that the Biden rule conflicts with these embodiments of the will of the Mississippi people.
Today’s complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana and can be read here. In August 2022, Attorney General Fitch became the first state AttorneyGeneral to sign the Women’s Bill of Rights, a grassroots effort led by the independent Women’s Voice, to support women’s privacy, safety, and opportunities against the Biden Administration’s increasing hostility toward title IX. In May 2023, she led a 22-state coalition’s comment letter opposing the Administration’s efforts to transform Title IX. Shortly after that, she published Why We Need the Women’s Bill of Rights with IWV’s vice-president Carrie Lukas.
