The Department of Education will not probe or take action on any complaints filed by transgender students who are banned from restrooms that match their gender identity, the department reported to BuzzFeed.
Liz Hill, a spokeperson for the agency, said that the Education Department's position is that Title IX, a 1972 federal civil rights law, does not cover restroom complaints from transgender students.
Hill said that some complaints from transgender students may be investigated, but not those regarding restroom use.
"Where students, including transgender students, are penalized or harassed for failing to conform to sex-based stereotypes, that is sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX… in the case of bathrooms, however, long-standing regulations provide that separating facilities on the basis of sex is not a form of discrimination prohibited by Title IX," Hill told BuzzFeed.
The new policy drew critique from Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department's civil rights office during Barack Obama's administration.
"Until now, the official position of the Department (of Education) has been that Title IX protects all students and that they are evaluating how that protection applies to the issue of bathroom access. This new categorical bar of civil rights protection for transgender children required to attend schools every day ignores the text of the law, courts' interpretation of the law, the stated position of the Department to date, and human decency," Lhamon said.
Federal appeals courts have recently ruled that barring an individual from the bathroom that matches his gender identity violates Title IX, including a May 2017 Wisconsin case in which the Wisconsin school district paid $800,000 to settle the complaint, BuzzFeed reported.
The Education Department ignoring those decisions is to "ignore the law in favor of their ideology," said Harper Jean Tobin, National Center for Transgender Equality policy director.
A Justice Department official told BuzzFeed that the department "cannot expand the law beyond what Congress has provided."
Lhamon called that stance an "appalling abdication of federal enforcement responsibility, inconsistent with the law and with courts' interpretation of the law."
A study suggests that 3 percent of U.S. teens are transgender or gender nonconforming, meaning they do not always self-identify as the gender they were assigned at birth.
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