A school district in Ohio filed suit Friday morning against the U.S. departments of Justice and Education over President Obama’s directive calling on schools to open bathrooms to the opposite sex to accommodate those who identify as transgender, or risk losing federal funding.

Highland Local School District has been threatened with a loss of funding because officials there are not allowing a biologically male student who identifies as female to access the girls’ locker rooms, showers and restrooms.

According to the lawsuit, the district has allowed the student, reportedly a fourth-grader, to use uni-sex bathrooms and has granted nearly all of the requests by the student’s guardian to respect the student’s professed gender. Still, the guardian filed a complaint with DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, which, in turn, ordered the school district to give the student full access to facilities of his/her choosing.

“Schools have a duty to protect the dignity, privacy and safety of all students. This is precisely what Highland Local School District has done,” says Jim Campbell, Senior Counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom which is representing the school district. “Despite that, the Department of Education is attempting to strong-arm Highland into complying with a lawless demand to open its single-sex overnight accommodations, locker rooms, showers and restrooms to students of the opposite sex.”

According to the ADF complaint, the Federal Government is leaving Highland an impossible choice: “capitulate to Defendants’ demands and sacrifice the dignity and privacy rights of their students; or protect those rights and watch Defendants strip away more than a million dollars each year in federal funding devoted to special-education programs, lunches for underprivileged children, and educational advancement.”

The ADF further argues that the “DOE is trying to redefine a federal law that only Congress can change.” As the ADF notes, “Contrary to the agency’s current directives, Title IX’s existing regulations specifically state that a school receiving federal funds can ‘provide separate toilet, locker room and shower facilities on the basis of sex’ without putting that funding at risk.”

At issue is the Obama administration’s unilateral and arguably unconstitutional rewrite of Title IX, a 1972 federal law that prohibits schools from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” Obama expanded the meaning of the law to include “gender identity, including discrimination based on a student’s transgender status.”

Ohio is the third state where the Alliance Defending Freedom has gone to court to stop the Obama administration’s rewrite of Title IX. The others are Illinois and North Carolina. Suits have also been filed in at least nine other states.

The entire ADF complaint is here.