The US Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a new rule by the Biden administration that would protect students from discrimination based on their gender identity.
The court order issued on Friday rejects a request by the White House to temporarily enforce the rule in a number of states.
The ruling is a victory for the Republican-led states that had opposed the law and a blow to transgender rights activists.
However, the order does not resolve the dispute and the legal challenges can continue in lower courts.
The new federal regulation, issued by the Biden administration in April, expands the parameters of a 1972 law known as Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination in schools funded by the federal government, including most universities.
The aim of the regulation was to clarify the legal definition of the term “on the basis of sex” to include gender identity.
Ten Republican-led states challenged the rule, which took effect in some parts of the country on August 1.
They filed lawsuits to prevent the law from being implemented in their jurisdictions and won the cases in lower courts in Louisiana and Kentucky.
The Supreme Court’s decision now sends the matter back to the lower courts.
The court’s decision was made by a vote of 5 to 4. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the court’s three liberal justices in his dissenting opinion.
The attorney general of the state of Tennessee, who has opposed the Biden administration’s new rule, issued a statement calling the Supreme Court’s move “a victory for student privacy, free speech and the rule of law.”
Cathryn Oakley of Human Rights Watch called it “disappointing that the Supreme Court has allowed far-right forces to stop the implementation of important civil rights protections for young people,” according to the New York Times.
Transgender rights have become an important political issue in the United States in recent years.
Conservatives in Republican-led states have passed laws banning students from using bathrooms that do not match their birth gender or prohibiting trans girls from playing on sports teams.
While the new rule did not specifically address sports, it prohibited schools from treating transgender students differently than their classmates, including when it came to accessing restrooms.
In its majority opinion, the court wrote that it did not seek to block the lower courts’ rulings, which had found that “the new definition of sex discrimination is intertwined with and impacts numerous other provisions of the new statute.”
