President Joe Biden announced last week that he was expanding rights under Title IX by including transgenderism in its definition of sex.
The 1972 Title IX of the Education Amendments prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program that a recipient of federal funding.
The change of rules doesn’t address the issue of transgender females (biological males) directly playing in women’s and girls’ sports. However, a draft proposal would have made schools that receive federal funds to allow men to compete against women.
While the rule change avoids that specific issue, it opens the door to schools that lose federal funding if they refuse to allow male students identifying as females to use facilities reserved for females, such as restrooms, dorm rooms, and shower facilities.
To be brief, the rule change doesn’t protect women and girls as Title IX was designed — it sets them up to become victims. It is now a weapon that can be used against women and girls.
“I never thought I’d see the day where Title IX would be used to harm women, but sadly, that day has come,” said Betsy DeVos, former Trump Education Secretary, to the National Review.
“The Biden administration’s radical rewrite of Title IX guts the half-century of protections and opportunities for women and callously replaces them with radical gender theory, as Biden’s far-left political base demanded. This regulation is an assault on women and girls,” added DeVos.
Miguel Cardona, Biden’s Education Secretary, acknowledges Title IX was established initially to protect the educational rights of women and girls.
“Before Title IX was passed in 1972, women and girls didn’t have equal access to education in this country,” said Cardona to the Washington Examiner last week. “That was unacceptable then, and it’s unfathomable now.”
Though the rule change sidesteps the issue of transgender sports temporarily, critics can see it coming around the corner.
“The Department of Education has placed Title IX, and the decades of advancement and protections for women and girls that it has yielded, squarely on the chopping block,” said GOP Representative Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce Committee.
She added, “This final rule dumps kerosene on the already raging fire that is Democrats’ contemptuous culture war that aims to radically redefine sex and gender.”
More kerosene was dumped “on the already raging fire” when the Fourth Circuit of Appeals reversed a lower court opinion last week and allowed a biological boy to compete in girls’ sports despite the “Save Women’s Sports Act” in West Virginia, which was designed to prevent that.
The decision has already received plenty of pushback from the girls the legislation was intended to protect.
“FIVE middle school female athletes in West Virginia refuse to throw shot put against male, Becky Pepper-Jackson,” Riley Gaines, former Kentucky swimmer and women’s sports activist, wrote. “This comes just 2 days after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the WV law that says you must compete in the category that matches your sex.”
“It’s a sad day when 13-14-year-old girls have to be the adults in the room, but I couldn’t be more inspired by and proud of these girls,” she added.
Judge Toby J. Heytens, appointed to the court by President Biden on June 30, 2021, drafted the 2-1 decision.
George W. Bush appointee Judge G. Steven Agee dissented. Kristen Waggoner, president, CEO, and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom, gave her brutal, brief legal opinion of the new federal rules regarding Title IX.
“The Biden admin can’t redefine ‘sex’ in Title IX without affecting women’s opportunities, including women’s sports. Under these rule changes, privacy, safety, parental rights, free speech, and yes — women’s sports are at risk,” she said on X. “This is an abuse of federal power that is anti-women, anti-science, and anti-logic,” continued Waggoner, before adding, “See you in court, @POTUS.”
The president’s claim that the new Title IX rules will strengthen and expand protections is as ridiculous as his claims of being raised in a Puerto Rican-Black-Jewish-Polish-Irish neighborhood that his uncle was eaten by cannibals during World War II, that the southern border is secure, or that Bidenomics is improving the economy.
This is just one more reason to hand Joe Biden his walking papers in November.
