Calling the Obama administration’s rules on transgender students “a massive social experiment”, Texas and 10 other states announced Wednesday that they are suing over the administration’s directive to US public schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

The lawsuit announced on Wednesday includes Oklahoma, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Maine, Arizona, Louisiana, Utah and Georgia. The challenge asks a judge to declare the White House’s directive unlawful.

The Obama administration has “conspired to turn workplace and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights”, the lawsuit reads.

Many of the conservative states involved had previously vowed defiance, calling the guidance a threat to safety while being accused of discrimination by supporters of transgender rights. US attorney general Loretta Lynch has said “there is no room in our schools for discrimination”.

In Oklahoma, state lawmakers immediately introduced a bill that would force schools to make bathrooms available to religious students that banned transgender individuals.

Texas’ lieutenant governor has previously said the state is willing to forfeit $10bn in federal education dollars rather than comply.

Pressed about whether he knew of any instances in which a child’s safety had been threatened because of transgender bathroom rights, Republican Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said “there’s not a lot of research”. He said his office has heard from concerned parents but didn’t say how many, and said he did not meet with any parents of transgender students before filing the lawsuit.

Protesters rally against North Carolina’s transgender bathroom bill HB2 in Raleigh. Photograph: Chuck Liddy/AP

Two school districts joined the states in the lawsuit: one is the tiny Harrold school district in north Texas, which has 100 students and passed a policy this week requiring students to use the bathroom based on the gender on their birth certificate. Superintendent David Thweatt said his schools have no transgender students to his knowledge but defended the district taking on the federal government.

“It’s not moot because it was thrusted upon us by the federal government,” Thweatt said, “or we were going to risk losing our federal funding.”

On Wednesday, liberal civil rights groups such as the National Center for Transgender Equality and the American Civil Liberties Union immediately decried the lawsuit.

“This is a direct attack on hundreds of thousands of transgender students, who are already vulnerable to bullying and harassment, and their loved ones,” Mara Keisling, the center’s executive director, said in a statement. “It dismisses practical guidelines that were requested by educators all over the nation and that have already been successful in thousands of school districts. This politically driven lawsuit is a sad waste of taxpayer money meant to stoke needless fears.”

The lawsuit makes no mention of any incidents that stemmed from the administration’s directive.

While the Obama administration is being sued, the real targets here are vulnerable young people and adults James Esseks

James Esseks, who directs the ACLU’s LGBT legal team, said that no such incidents have taken place.

“There have been no disruptions, increases in public safety incidents, nor invasions of privacy related to protections for transgender people,” he said in a statement. “While the Obama administration is being sued, the real targets here are vulnerable young people and adults who simply seek to live their lives free from discrimination when they go to school, work or the restroom.”

A sign protesting a recent law restricting transgender bathroom access. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters

The directive from the US justice and education departments represents an escalation in the fast-moving dispute over what is becoming the civil rights issue of the day. The education department had previously said that it interprets federal civil rights laws against gender bias as protecting transgender students. The department has slapped individual schools that failed to accommodate openly transgender students with lawsuits and threats to withdraw federal education dollars.

But the directive of 12 days ago was a proactive measure aimed at all schools, whether or not they had confronted the question of how to accommodate a transgender student.

The question of whether federal civil rights law protects transgender people has not been definitively answered by the courts and may ultimately be decided by the supreme court. In April, a federal appeals court in Virginia became the highest court in the country to wade into one of these disputes when it ruled that a trans high school boy in Virginia must be granted access to the men’s room.

Most confrontations between the education department and school districts have previously ended with the school agreeing to accommodate the trans students.

The guidance was issued after the justice department and North Carolina sued each other over a state law that requires transgender people to use the public bathroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificate. The law applies to schools and many other places.



Supporters say such measures are needed to protect women and children from sexual predators, while the justice department and others argue the threat is practically nonexistent and the law discriminatory.

Reuters contributed to this report.