The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a request from the Biden administration to put on hold new restrictions on sex discrimination in education in roughly half the country.
The court voted 5-4, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joining three liberal justices in dissent.
At issue were protections for pregnant students and students who are parents, and the procedures schools must follow to respond to complaints of sexual misconduct.
The most notable of the new restrictions are those protecting transgender students, but they were not included in the university administration’s petition to the Supreme Court.
These too remain blocked in 25 states and hundreds of universities and schools across the country due to lower court orders.
The case continues in those courts.
The rule also went into effect at other schools and universities in the US on August 1.
As transgender visibility has grown in recent years, the rights of transgender people, particularly young people, have become a major political battleground.
Most Republican-controlled states ban gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender minors, and some have adopted policies that restrict which school bathrooms transgender people can use or bar transgender girls from participating in some sports.
President Joe Biden’s administration sought to settle some of the dispute in April with regulations protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ students under Title IX, a 1972 law that bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.
The rules took two years to develop and garnered 240,000 responses, a record for the Department of Education.
The rule declares that treating transgender students differently from their classmates, such as by restricting their use of restrooms, is illegal discrimination.
Participation in sports, a particularly contentious topic, is not explicitly mentioned.
Enforcement of Title IX remains highly unstable.
In a series of rulings, federal courts declared that the rules could not be enforced in most of the Republican-leaning states that sued while the litigation was ongoing.
In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court majority wrote that it was declining to question the lower court’s decision, which concluded that “the new definition of sex discrimination is intertwined with and affects many other provisions of the new rule.”
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the lower court’s order was overbroad because it “prohibited the government from enforcing the entire rule, including provisions that are clearly unrelated to defendants’ alleged harm.”
