Welcome to Gavel Drop, our roundup of legal news, headlines, and head-shaking moments in the courts.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will appeal a Texas judge’s nationwide injunction barring the Obama administration from implementing guidelines aimed at protecting transgender students against discrimination.

Louisiana’s attorney general got legal clearance to continue blocking a law that would protect LGBTQ workers.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is challenging a Massachusetts law, which permits trans people to use their preferred bathroom, on religious freedom grounds because, according to their misguided and patently transphobic point of view, the law “[forces] churches to open their sensitive areas—like changing rooms and restrooms—to members of the opposite sex.”

Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed writes about the stories behind the United States’ legal shift regarding transgender rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon filed a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Corrections on behalf of a trans inmate whose requests for hormone treatment have been repeatedly denied despite an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Jedediah Stout of Missouri was sentenced to more than five years in prison for setting a mosque on fire and trying to burn down a Planned Parenthood clinic.

A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit filed against the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who signed on to the majority opinion that legalized marriage equality nationwide.

People of color can receive less money in damages than white people despite more education, because the U.S. legal system explicitly uses race and gender to determine how much victims or their families should receive in compensation when they are seriously injured or killed.

Two women suspected of drug use while pregnant are being charged in Alabama with exposing a “child” to an “environment” in which controlled substances are ingested, produced, or distributed.

Ohio Democrats filed an emergency motion with the Supreme Court asking for a halt on voting laws that they say unnecessarily restrict the right to vote for and harm voters of color more than white voters.