Texas AG threatens school district with $5K daily fines over bathroom bill violation

When he's not preoccupied with his race for U.S. Senate, Attorney General Ken Paxton has found time to take on another issue of great importance to him: what bathrooms students at public schools use.

On the morning of Friday, March 6, Paxton announced that he’d sent a letter to Austin Independent School District warning that the district could be fined $5,000 a day for violations of a new Texas law restricting the public bathrooms transgender people can use. An Austin ISD parent complained to the AG's office last month, claiming that a student, whose transgender status is unknown, used the girl's bathroom at Austin High School. 

Conservative group Texas Values publicized the complaint in February. In the complaint, a parent (whose name is redacted) alleges her daughter saw "a male student" using the girl's bathroom at Austin High School in January. The parent emailed Austin ISD to notify administrators that the school was violating Senate Bill 8, the Texas Women's Privacy Act (also known as the "bathroom bill") passed by the Texas Legislature last summer. The parent emailed again twice in early February but claimed to have never received any response from Austin ISD. 

Now, Paxton is involved. Under SB 8, transgender Texans are required to use public bathrooms that align with their biological sex, not their gender identity. While the law does not fine individuals, it gives the AG's office the power to fine public building owners including local governments or school districts if they don't follow the law. Paxton gave Austin ISD 15 days to "cure" the violation of SB 8, meaning that Austin ISD must stop allowing transgender students to use bathrooms and changing rooms that match their gender identity.

"I will work tirelessly to hold Austin ISD accountable if it does not stop its unlawful, woke policy of allowing men to invade women's spaces," Paxton said in a release Friday morning. "The law is clear that political subdivisions in Texas must not allow biological men to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, yet Austin ISD has intentionally chosen to do that in violation of S.B. 8."

Paxton, whose hostility to LGBTQ+ rights is well-documented, went on to call transgender women "mentally ill men who want to pretend they're girls." However, the student in question has not been identified as being transgender, and presumably none of the students involved are old enough to qualify as "men" or "women."

Austin ISD did not immediately respond to comment.

Public schools and universities have been at the center of several incidents since Texas' bathroom bill came into force in December. In February, a transgender graduate student at the University of North Texas was investigated for an alleged violation of SB 8. Other Texas colleges such as the University of Houston and Blinn Community College have taken steps to remove gender neutral bathrooms and place signage in public bathrooms about the new law. 

Paxton's threat is another move to restrict the rights of transgender people in Texas and one of several efforts to crack down on LGBTQ+ expression in Texas schools. In addition to the bathroom bill, Texas lawmakers passed a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ bills last session. One, Senate Bill 12, forbids Texas schools from calling transgender students by their preferred pronouns and requires teachers to deadname them. The bill also bans mentions of sexual orientation or gender identity in K-12 curriculum and outlaws clubs like Gay-Straight Alliances and other LGBTQ-centered organizations. Last month, a federal court temporarily blocked three Texas school districts from enforcing certain parts of the law.