In August 2024, Parents Defending Education (PDE) and its partners filed a reply brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. They asked the court to keep the U.S. Department of Education’s new Title IX rule from taking effect in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina while their appeal is decided. The court had already paused the rule with a short-term “administrative injunction.” PDE asked the court to turn it into an “injunction pending appeal,” which would last until the appeal is resolved.
The brief argued:
- The rule was blocked in every other challenging state. Courts had paused the rule in all 26 states that sued. The Department could not explain why it should take full effect in only these four before courts decide whether it is legal.
- The Department’s reasons don’t hold up. These four states did not wait too long to sue, and they did not offer weaker evidence or arguments than the other states.
- This court’s own precedent cuts against the rule. In Adams v. School Board of St. Johns County, the Eleventh Circuit upheld a school’s policy of separating bathrooms by biological sex. That ruling blocks the rule’s treatment of bathrooms and seriously weakens its new definition of sex discrimination. Other courts that froze the rule cited Adams as support.
PDE urged the court to keep things as they were and not make the Eleventh Circuit “the first and only outlier.”
Read the full brief below:
