On October 1, Attorney General Paxton won a major victory when the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas struck down two Biden Administration agency rules concerning “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” The Biden Administration has declined to appeal the trial court’s nullification of the two rules, which makes the court’s ruling permanent.
The trial court found the two agency actions had similar flaws, being issued without following proper procedures and exceeding the bounds of the statutes they purported to implement. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller also provided evidence of the injury this rule would inflict on his agency’s reasonable workplace policies.
One rule from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) mandated that employers adopt policies requiring bathroom, locker room, shower, and pronoun usage to be based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex. The other rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), threatened Texas with loss of federal funds unless it changed its child-abuse laws to allow “sex-change” procedures to be performed on children.
“This is an important win for common sense and Texas families,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Biden’s failure to appeal by the deadline means this victory is now secure—Texas employers and employees will not be forced to have workplaces infused with woke gender theories, and Texas children will be safe from the Biden Administration’s so-called sexual orientation and gender identity agenda.”