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When Michigan Had No AG Title IX Suit: How a Private Case Met a Vacated Rule
Five Stones backed GEI’s private Title IX challenge in Michigan. After multi-state pressure, the federal rules were vacated. The case settled with attorney fees paid.
The case page is Michigan Title IX challenge.
Five Stones Legal Defense Fund filed federal litigation for the Great Education Initiative (GEI) challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s rewrite of Title IX for Michigan schools. The suit raised First Amendment rights, sharing of intimate spaces, and the major-questions doctrine: agency power used to push gender-identity policies without Congress rewriting the statute.
What the rule changed
The Department’s final Title IX rule expanded the sex-discrimination ban to sexual orientation and gender identity. The rewrite drew at least nine lawsuits. At least 26 states signed on, and the rule was on hold in 26 states.
GEI’s Michigan case was a private lawsuit, not an attorney-general case, in a state where no other lawsuit challenging that final rule had been filed. It ties the dispute to bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports, and to a rule that required schools to discipline for sexual-orientation and gender-identity discrimination.
How it ended
After this litigation and other multi-state challenges, the federal government rescinded and vacated the Title IX rules at issue. The lawsuit then settled, and the federal government agreed to pay attorney fees.
It contrasts that private filing with the attorney-general suits. A membership organization brought a statewide challenge where no parallel attorney-general suit against the final rule was on file. The practical questions for families were local: speech, discipline, and sex-separated spaces. The case page treats the major-questions doctrine as part of the fight over who writes those rules.
Five Stones is a 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 39-2456963), not a law firm. See the case page.
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