Thanks to Title IX, more than ten times as many women and girls now participate in athletic activities in K-12 schools and in institutions of higher education than did fifty years ago.
As the parent of two female student athletes, I am grateful for the opportunities my daughters had to participate in sports and for the lessons in self-confidence and the pursuit of excellence that participating in sports provided to them.
But all that is about to go by the wayside if Joe Biden and the lunatic fringe of the Democratic Party are allowed to rewrite Title IX to require that men who “identify” as women are allowed to compete in women’s sports.
As Eileen J. O'Connor explained in a column for American Greatness, on April 19, 2024, the Biden administration finalized regulations it proposed in July 2022.
To avoid backlash at the polls this November, the administration recently indicated it is postponing finalizing the proposed sports-related Title IX regulations it published in April 2023. In each case, the regulations do something that not only the Executive Branch does not have authority to do but also what Congress has specifically declined to do: They declare that “sex” in Title IX actually means biological sex and sexual orientation, and gender identity, not biological sex alone.
And make no mistake, this is something that is wholly owned by the Democratic Party. As Ms. O’Connor pointed out, in 2014 and earlier, the Department of Education told teachers who inquired that they must permit boys who claim to identify as girls to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. There are other examples.
It is laughable, wrote Ms. O’Connor, to suggest that in 1972, when Congress passed and President Nixon signed Title IX, they meant for “sex” to actually mean sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. If they did, then girls and women do not now and never did have spaces or activities to call their own, and Title IX is not worth the paper on which it was written.
Alabama’s Sen. Tuberville and others have introduced legislation to save girls’ and women’s sports by excluding from them athletes who are not girls and women. Tuberville asks: Where are the activists who got Title IX enacted? The answer: They’ve gone to the other side, observed Ms. O’Connor.
The National Organization for Women, for example, argues that it is unlawful sex discrimination to exclude boys and men from the activities and private spaces reserved exclusively for girls and women.
And it gets worse.
These new regulations demand that – under the threat of legal consequences – everyone else indulge the fantasies of men who “identify” as women – right down to requiring every American to use the “preferred pronoun” of the lunatic.
Under the new rules school districts, colleges and universities that don't follow transgender and nonbinary students' pronouns or force them to use restrooms that don't align with their “gender identity” could be committing federal civil rights violations beginning this fall.
And it gets much worse, as Ms. O’Connor outlined below.
The philosophy represented by these proposed Title IX regulations has seeped into every aspect of life and is especially insidious in the education of young, impressionable children and vulnerable adolescents.
So, science teachers’ associations have prepared and are promoting curricula teaching that there are more than two “genders” and planting the seed of thought in elementary school and earlier that, notwithstanding physical attributes and parents’ guidance, the student might not actually be the sex he or she was “assigned at birth.”
Some jurisdictions forbid teachers and school administrators from advising parents when their school children express dissatisfaction with or confusion about their sex. They call it “outing.”
Other states have passed laws prohibiting schools and teachers from encouraging students to “transition” and from hiding a student’s “transition” from his or her parents. They do it anyway.
State and local governments – even in Republican-led jurisdictions – are taking children from parents who decline to “affirm” their belief that they are the opposite sex. In divorce custody battles, the parent who “affirms” the delusions of the confused child is favored over the parent counseling the child to accept his or her body and endure adolescence the way humans have for all time.
Inasmuch as Biden’s Title IX regulations have been published in proposed form with opportunity for public comment, they comply with the Administrative Procedure Act. But because they completely pervert the intended purpose of the law they purport to implement, they would be unlawful and, if promulgated, must be struck down, either by Congress using the Congressional Review Act or by courts on an expedited basis. The harm the policies they represent have already caused is incalculable.
Department of Education Office for Civil Rights
Catherine Lhamon
Title IX regulation
Assistant Education Secretary Catherine Lhamon
Gender identity
definition of sex
definition of sexual harrassment
14th Amendment due process
Independent and impartial investigations
Unrestricted access to evidence
Right to a live hearing and cross-examination
Women's sports