TEXAS — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday announced he has sued the Biden administration to stop the expansion of the gender equity law known as Title IX.

The Biden administration last week detailed changes to Title IX that add protections for transgender, LGBTQ+ and pregnant students to federal civil rights law on sex-based discrimination. Those changes are set to take effect in August.

Also set to change is a Trump-era guidance on how schools should handle cases of sexual assault.

Specifically, according to a Department of Education fact sheet, the update prohibits discrimination “based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.” That includes protections for transgender students.

Paxton, in a news release announcing the lawsuit, characterized the changes as an attack on women.

“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” Paxton said. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality. Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.”

Paxton said America First Legal is serving as co-counsel. It’s president, Stephen Miller, who was senior adviser to former President Donald Trump, said the update will force women and girls to share locker rooms and bathrooms with assigned males at birth.

“America First Legal is honored to stand with the great Ken Paxton and the State of Texas in filing this emergency lawsuit to stop Biden’s war on women. Biden’s new Title IX regulation is a vile obscenity: it forces women and girls to share locker rooms and restrooms with men,” Miller wrote.

The 1,577-page regulation finalized last week seeks to clarify Title IX, the 1972 sex discrimination law originally passed to address women’s rights.

At least 11 states have adopted laws barring transgender girls and women from using girls’ and women’s bathrooms at public schools.

The new regulation opposes those sweeping policies.

It states that sex separation at schools isn’t always unlawful. However, the separation becomes a violation of Title IX’s nondiscrimination rule when it causes more than a very minor harm on a protected individual, “such as when it denies a transgender student access to a sex-separate facility or activity consistent with that student’s gender identity.”