Biden official kept enforcing ‘gender identity’ rule despite court order: whistleblower

In violation of a court order, a high-ranking Department of Education official during the Biden administration continued to investigate schools that banned gender-confused males from women’s spaces, a whistleblower alleged in a complaint made public last week.

Now, a watchdog organization is calling on the department to “finalize and release” an investigation on the matter.

“The Biden administration tried to cover this up,” Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, told The College Fix on Friday.

Leavitt’s organization is representing the whistleblower, Timothy Mattson, an attorney in the department’s Office for Civil Rights. 

Last week, it published Mattson’s 2024 complaint, which alleges, among other things, that a former department secretary “subtly threatened a personnel action” against him for raising concerns.

“There needs to be a full accounting of how the Biden administration ignored this court order and all the school districts that it put into fear by opening all these investigations they weren’t supposed to open,” Leavitt said in a phone interview.

The matter has to do with the Democrat administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX, which added “gender identity and sexual orientation” as protected categories in the anti-discrimination law. 

In July 2022, after 20 states sued, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the change. 

However, Mattson’s complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleges his department continued to open and investigate these cases. This put pressure on schools and colleges to comply with the Biden administration’s views on gender. 

Cases included an Alaska school district that banned male athletes who claim to be female from girls’ sports, according to the complaint.

‘Disregard’

The complaint alleges that directives to ignore the court order came from Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights at the time. 

According to the complaint, Lhamon advised Mattson’s supervisor that “she planned to disregard advice provided to her” by general counsel. Parts of the whistleblower’s complaint regarding Lhamon are redacted. 

Then, when Mattson raised concerns about one case, the complaint alleges Lhamon “subtly threatened a personnel action” against him for “disclosing a violation of the law” and “for refusing to obey an order that Mr. Mattson believed would require him to violate” the law.

Lhamon, who left the department in January, now works for the University of California at Berkeley Law. She is the inaugural executive director of its Edley Center on Law and Democracy, and her listed expertise includes “Gender and Sexuality” and “Racial and Social Justice.”

UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky called the whistleblower’s allegations “unsubstantiated” in a statement to The Fix. 

“Catherine Lhamon has tremendous experience as a public interest lawyer and in high-level government positions and is widely recognized for her integrity and commitment to civil rights. She was hired after a thorough national search,” Chemerinsky stated Wednesday when asked about the whistleblower’s complaint.  

“She is superbly qualified to lead the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and has our full confidence. These are unsubstantiated allegations, and they do not change our confidence in her,” he said in the email via the law school media relations office.

Lhamon did not respond to several requests for comment via email. 

Other allegations against her in the complaint say she told attorneys in the department that “she wanted to share her intentions via email, but chose not to do so to avoid making an (electronic) paper trail.” 

Additionally, it alleges Mattson was told that Lhamon “intended to continue processing transgender cases irrespective of the court order” and “acknowledged staff might be held in contempt of court” for doing so.

The complaint gives examples of several cases that the Office for Civil Rights worked on allegedly in violation of the court injunction. 

One involves the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska. Allegedly, the government opened an investigation into the school board for “taking action to limit membership of girls’ athletics teams to students who were assigned female at birth,” according to the letter

In another case, the office began investigating whether Bryan County Schools in Georgia discriminated against a female student who claimed to be male and wanted to use the boy’s restroom, the whistleblower alleges. 

Other cases mentioned include incidents of alleged “gender identity” or “transgender” discrimination at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana and Oberlin College in Ohio.

Waiting for answers

Last year, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel reviewed the whistleblower’s allegations, and referred the case to the Education Department for further investigation, according to Empower Oversight.  

In December, the department issued its investigation, stating that it “did not substantiate the allegation that OCR is violating the Court’s injunction” and “determined that OCR took reasonable steps to ensure compliance with the Court’s injunction.”

However, Empower Oversight believes the department’s response “omitted material facts and contained false and misleading statements,” according to its news release.

This included allegedly excluding evidence from another attorney, a supervisor of Mattson’s, whose statements backed up his own, according to a January letter by watchdog group. 

Now that the Trump administration is in office, Leavitt told The Fix he has “confidence” that a thorough investigation will be conducted. 

Mattson is still employed by the department, making the matter more urgent, according to the watchdog group.

“Some of the employees involved in the wrongdoing disclosed by Empower Oversight’s client were subsequently included in [the Trump administration’s] reduction in force,” it stated. “Now, a recent court order requires the DOEd to return to duty some of the same employees. This makes it especially important that the DOEd finalize its investigative report so it can ensure employees found to have violated the law are held accountable.”

The College Fix contacted the Department of Education’s press office last week to ask about the investigation. An automated email response stated that the department would respond after the government shutdown ends.

Lhamon’s actions have come under scrutiny before. After Biden nominated her to the Office for Civil Rights in 2021, Senate Republicans and due-process advocates questioned her position on the rights of accused students, The Fix previously reported.

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