Should boys share bathrooms with girls? Is it fair for males to gain spots on female-sports teams? The U.S. government seems to think so. Many parents beg to differ.

The Biden administration released revised regulations to Title IX on April 19, spurring a backlash from states and organizations, including a flurry of lawsuits. Set to be implemented on August 1 and spanning more than 1,500 pages, the revisions “expand protections for pregnant individuals and students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex,” and allow “schools to return to the single-investigator model, offer an informal resolution procedure, and eliminate a live hearing requirement in instances of handling sexual assault claims,” according to Law.com

Lawmakers, women’s groups, and other common-sense advocates call it an overreach that reverses years of progress for women and squashes due process for men. Noting that Biden’s plan would compel speech at schools from kindergarten through college, they point to an assault on religious rights, parents’ rights, and free speech.

Title IX became law on June 23, 1972, and stipulated that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

An Epoch Times summary explains: “The Title IX Act, which is federal legislation, explicitly forbids any form of sex discrimination in funded educational programs or activities, including sexual harassment and sexual violence. The new rule defines sexual harassment as including harassment based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

That phrase, “gender identity,” is key. Failing to use someone’s pronouns, for instance, could qualify as harassment. According to an Education Week story, because Biden’s revised policy went through a formal rulemaking and public-commenting process, it wields more legal power than a similar argument the Obama administration offered in nonbinding guidance in 2016.

Sarah Parshall Perry, former senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, said in The Daily Wire, “Under the new rule, girls and women will no longer have any sex-separated bathrooms, locker rooms, housing accommodations, or other educational programs.”

Schools that receive any government funding will be required to impose leftist language. People could be forced to speak words they don’t believe. “Students and faculty MUST compel their speech by requiring the use of preferred pronouns,” explained former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines. “If the guidelines above are ignored or even questioned, then YOU can be charged with harassment.”

Gaines has joined other prominent athletes, coaches, and women’s advocates on the Take Back Title IX Summer Bus Tour. Hosted by Our Bodies, Our Sports and weaving its way across the country, the tour “will call attention to the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations and the devastating impact the new rules will have on women, and the growing threat to women’s equal athletic opportunity, privacy, and safety.”

Kim Russell, ambassador for the Independent Women’s Forum and former head coach for women’s lacrosse at Oberlin College, said:⁠
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“The original version of Title IX was 37 words … the Biden administration—in 1,500 pages—is trying to hide that they are equating the word sex with gender identity. ⁠
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“[E]very institution in the country that accepts federal funding, which is pretty much every school, many daycare facilities, and almost every college, including private colleges that accept the FAFSA, is going to have to comply with this rule. And it’s saying that men, again, will be able to take away opportunities from women. ⁠
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“[I]t is not upholding Title IX at all. It is stripping away all rights that women have had for the last 52 years, including me. It’s how I went to college on an athletic scholarship to play two sports at the D1 level, at William and Mary. And what enabled me to do what I’ve done for the rest of my life, which is coach and teach. So it’s really insulting, because it’s not speaking the truth.”⁠

While interviewing Megyn Kelly, Charlie Kirk posited that the Title IX rewrite has cast the very idea of what a female is onto the November 5 ballot. Kelly agreed: “It has been rewritten by Joe Biden, who—the most he knows about women is how to sniff their hair. … [H]e just shoe-horned the trans people into the women’s lane and defined women under Title IX as including gender identity. So now he’s saying it doesn’t cover sports yet, that’s a lie. As written with the revision, it does cover sports, and they’re going to argue that. It also mandates explicitly that the men be allowed into our bathrooms, into our locker rooms. Not just college. K through college.”

Kelly went on to say that the rewrite “completely removes due process for young men on college campuses. You better not get accused as a young man on a college campus. Don’t have sex with anybody. Don’t touch anybody. Don’t be alone with anybody. If you get accused by somebody with a Sunday-morning regret, you’re going down. That’s how it was under Obama. Trump righted the ship back, due-process-wise, now it’s been undone again.”

Swift Response

Pushback was immediate, from state leaders directing their schools not to comply with Biden’s regulations to a spate of lawsuits filed by states and organizations.

Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group that advocates for parents’ rights, called on the National Governors Association to defend families.

“Title IX will no longer protect our children. Instead, it will deprive them of educational opportunities, free speech rights, and at times put them in physical danger,” MFL wrote in an April 24 letter to the NGA. “The Department of Education’s re-write of Title IX undermines the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. It destroys parents’ ability to make decisions about their children’s moral behavior, education, and health care in a manner consistent with the best evidence from science and medicine, as well as their moral and religious values.”

Governors and officials in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas have directed their schools not to follow the revisions.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, “We will not comply, and we will fight back. We are not going to let Joe Biden try to inject men into women’s activities. We are not going to let Joe Biden undermine the rights of parents, and we are not going to let Joe Biden abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us here in Florida.”

Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education, Dr. Cade Brumley, directed schools not to “alter policies or procedures” based on Biden’s new rules. Brumley said his office is collaborating with the Louisiana governor and attorney general to review the lengthy revisions and gauge their effect.

“These new rules have been in development for nearly two years, and I have previously submitted comments in staunch opposition as it alters the long-standing definition that has created fairness and equal access to opportunity for women and men. At this time, my opposition to these new Title IX rules remains unchanged. The Title IX rule changes recklessly endanger students and seek to dismantle equal opportunities for females,” Brumley wrote.

In a letter to all Oklahoma superintendents, Ryan Walters, state superintendent of public instruction, said, “I believe these rule changes are illegal and unconstitutional. They violate the First Amendment, the Administrative Procedures Act, and longstanding civil rights protections for women and girls.” He referred to Oklahoma legislation currently under debate, which would define “man” and “woman” by biological sex. If it becomes law, it would stand in “direct conflict” to the new federal regulations.

“In Oklahoma, we don’t bend to the senseless will of Biden and his posse eradicating women’s rights and putting women in danger,” Walters told the Washington Examiner. “This is why I’ve instructed every superintendent in my state to completely ignore Biden’s new Title IX changes that allow males to roam in female locker rooms, dorms, and bathrooms—places where women should feel safe.”

Lawsuits

Those opposed to Biden’s regulation promised quick legal action—and delivered.

In an April 19 post on X, ADF president Kristen Waggoner wrote, “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. This is an abuse of federal power that is anti-women, anti-science, and anti-logic. See you in court, @POTUS.”

Such assurances have come to fruition. Suzanne Bowdey noted in The Washington Stand that, “Thanks to Joe Biden’s universally despised (and unconstitutionally executed) changes to Title IX, this White House now finds itself on the wrong side of an avalanche of lawsuits.”

As of this writing, different states, coalitions of states, and organizations have filed a number of lawsuits:

  • Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, along with the Independent Women’s Law Center, the Independent Women’s Network, Parents Defending Education, and Speech First have filed a suit addressing “the issue of due process rights and a person’s rights being revoked under the new Title IX rules—which could bring additional litigation, legal and historical experts anticipate.”
  • Texas’s lawsuit said Biden’s revisions “effect radical social change” in U.S. schools. “Stymied in its attempts to implement this agenda through informal agency guidance, and unable to amend Title IX through the legislative process, the Department has now formally amended the Code of Federal Regulations. This Final Rule tells States and other regulated parties that they must ignore biological sex or face enforcement actions and the loss of federal education funding,” the original complaint said.
  • A suit filed by Louisiana, along with Montana, Mississippi, and Idaho said, “There is normal federal government overreach—and then there is the Final Rule: a naked attempt to strong-arm our schools into molding our children in the current federal government’s preferred image of how a child should think, act, and speak. The Final Rule is an affront to the dignity of families and school administrators everywhere, and it is nowhere close to legal.”
  • The suit filed by Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia said the “sweeping and unlawful Title IX reading will bar schools’ long-lawful practices to protect student privacy, perversely hamper fair competition in women’s sports, and punish States for following their laws.”
  • Oklahoma has brought two suits: one by Attorney General Gentner Drummond, and the other by the state Education Department. “Title IX was designed to ensure women had the guarantee of sex equality in education and an environment free from discrimination, but this rewriting—rooted in radical gender theory that ignores biological reality—has set back the cause of civil rights for women by generations,” State Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a statement. “I will do everything possible to protect the essential and fundamental right of women and girls to have safe spaces of their own to compete, change clothes, and use the bathroom.”
  • Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota in their lawsuit note that Biden’s rewrite “radically” reinterprets Title IX and reverses its protections.
  • A suit filed by Kansas, Alaska, Wyoming, Utah, Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation, and Female Athletes United points to Biden’s rule-rewrite as “unlawful,” and “arbitrary and capricious,” while it violates “the Constitution’s Spending Clause, and the First, Fifth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments.”
  • Louisiana’s Rapides Parish School Board filed suit against the U.S. Department of Education. The board represents 42 schools and about 21,000 pre-K through twelfth-grade students. According to the complaint, Biden’s rewrite “redefines ‘sex’ to mean ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex characteristics,’ and ‘I sex stereotypes’ (among other things). What that means for schools is clear: Schools must ignore sex to promote a person’s subjective sense of their gender. And schools must do so even though it deprives their female students of the equal opportunities in education that Title IX promised in 1972. By rewriting federal law in this way, the Biden administration will force schools to impose widespread harms on young people and deny free speech rights.”

In June, two courts issued injunctions to halt the revisions in ten states. A federal district court in Louisiana issued the first injunction in the Rapides Parish case, covering Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho. In his conclusion, Judge Terry Doughty said, “This case demonstrates the abuse of power by executive federal agencies in the rulemaking process.”

Meanwhile, a Kentucky district court’s injunction includes Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. “If the new rule is allowed to take effect on August 1, 2024, all plaintiffs will suffer immediate and irreparable harm. Because the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their claims, and the public interest and equities highly favor their position, the new rule will be enjoined, and its application stayed,” Judge Danny Reeves wrote.

Far-Reaching Fallout

Biden’s reinterpretation of Title IX has stirred the interest of other groups, including the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, known as ICONS, and the United Nations. In a letter to the U.N., ICONS co-founders Marshi Smith and Kim Jones said the rewrite will lead to violence against women, including physical and mental suffering.

The letter, addressed to Reem Alsalem, U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said that letting men into women’s sports is violence because “norms of eligibility are violated and the risk of injuries to athletes of a given category are knowingly elevated.”

“Title IX was a federal law written to protect women, and the Biden administration has now turned it into a law that protects men at the expense of women,” Smith and Jones told the Washington Examiner.

With men competing on women’s teams, female athletes already have been injured and robbed of opportunities. At a high-school volleyball game in North Carolina, for instance, Payton McNabb, a female player, was hurt when a male player slammed a ball into her face. She endured a concussion and now grapples with neurological complications, including partial paralysis and impaired memory.

In 2022, Lia (formerly Will) Thomas deprived female collegiate swimmers of NCAA Championship titles in the 500-yard freestyle event, including two Olympic medalists, Emma Weyant and Erica Sullivan. During the same competition, Thomas tied with Riley Gaines for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle. Because there was only one fifth-place trophy, NCAA officials gave it to Thomas, and told Gaines hers would arrive by mail.

“We know that male advantage can never be undone,” Smith and Jones wrote. “But even if it could, a man that has diminished his athletic ability through manipulation of his hormone levels is not a woman. The erasure of women as a sex class must be stopped.”

Alsalem responded to Biden’s new rule in a release, saying: “The erroneous redefinition of ‘sex’ through these implementing regulations constitutes a grave setback that will increase the vulnerability of the majority of women and girls to incursions into their privacy, including voyeurism, sexual harassment and physical and sexual attacks, by effectively removing single sex spaces.”

Under the new regulations, Alsalem said, the U.S. runs afoul of its responsibilities under international human rights laws to “prohibit and prevent discrimination based on sex, which in its common meaning can only be taken to mean ‘biological sex.’”

This fall, she’s slated to deliver a report to the U.N. General Assembly focused on violence against women and girls in sports. As part of that report, Alsalem sought feedback from a variety of sources, including female athletes (women and girls), parents, athletic organizations, state-run groups, and more. She asked about the different forms of violence, how violence violates women’s human rights, who the perpetrators are, and how to prevent violence.

 

A War on Our Words

The federal government’s push to alter our speech is a long-pursued goal of leftists.

In a 2019 PragerU Video, “Preferred Pronouns or Prison,” Abigail Shrier notes, “If you want to control people’s thoughts, begin by controlling their words. That’s totalitarian thinking. It was once completely foreign to America. Not anymore. Increasingly, Americans are forced to use language against their will or even their conscience, or be prepared to suffer the consequences. And those consequences can be dire.”

Shrier highlights cases where state and local actions have punished health-care workers, teachers, employers, and landlords who refused to use pronouns. Some cited religious convictions. They couldn’t utter what they didn’t believe.

U.S. law upholds that, as Shrier indicates. In a 1943 Supreme Court decision, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that the state doesn’t have the authority to force people to say what they don’t believe.

But the left often flouts the law. If people can be forced to say what they don’t believe, eventually, they’ll believe it. Language shapes our thoughts and grasp of reality. Christopher Rufo has said that “language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society: in law, arts, rhetoric, or common speech.”

In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote that “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes. … It [the English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Orwell argues that writers easily “shirk” their duties by resorting to “ready-made phrases” that “construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

He believed that political speech and writing were “largely the defence of the indefensible.” For example, “Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

A 2024 example of that might be a man who believes he’s a woman ingests hormones, undergoes surgeries, and dons women’s attire to compete on a female athletic team—this is called trans rights. The mental picture conjured by “trans rights” is obscure, at best, and certainly hides the truth.

Michael Rose of the New Oxford Review said that just as language was the primary change agent in Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, so it is today. Academia, mainstream media, and the publishing industry have bowed to social activists pushing a pronoun agenda. Rose points to groups promoting the use of “they” as a singular pronoun, including the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Psychological Association, and the Chicago Manual of Style.

Merriam-Webster has expanded the definition of “they” to include references to individuals who don’t identify with the pronouns “he” or “she.” (“Nonbinary” often is used to describe this—yet another language adjustment.) Likewise, the Chicago Manual of Style recognizes that usage. In 2017, the Associated Press Stylebook changed its guidance to include “limited use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.”

These entities set the rules, styles, and norms for students, journalists, authors, and most writers. They hold sway over anyone who writes or reads. According to Rose, “the choice of academia, the media, and the publishing industry to adopt the singular they is not simply about word choice—as silly and illogical as it may be: Alex needs to learn their lines by Friday!—it is about forcing students and others to accept the language of transgenderism and the ideological corollaries behind the vocabulary. It is asking us all to accept something that is less than reality.”

The term “gender-affirming care” brings another gross distortion of our language. It refers to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, surgeries, and other therapies meant to support those who identify as transgender. Though couched in positive terms, courageous de-transitioners and health-care providers have shown these interventions to be destructive.

One provider is Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist focused on children and adolescents. She treats young people who identify as transgender and their families. In her pivotal book, Lost in Trans Nation, Grossman said, “The beliefs that man and woman are human inventions, that the sex of a healthy newborn is arbitrarily and often incorrectly ‘assigned,’ and that as a result the child requires ‘affirmation’ through risky medical interventions—these ideas are divorced from reality and therefore hazardous, especially to children. They are, in fact, a mockery of twenty-first-century science and cause immeasurable harm to young people and their families. I know, because I’m a psychiatrist and they’re my patients.”

More than fifteen years ago, Grossman discovered the foundations of this dangerous netherworld, dubbing it “Genderland” in the final chapter of her 2009 book, You’re Teaching My Child WHAT? Her research revealed sex-ed groups promoting “bizarre and destabilizing ideas about identity,” teaching them “as facts to vulnerable students.” Among other things, the groups taught kids that their gender identity might change over time, and that being transgender was normal.

Grossman disproved the ideas and cautioned parents about Genderland as “a dumbfounding departure from reality” and “a recipe for physical and emotional disaster for our kids.” We’re now living through that disaster, she said, with boys and girls confused about their identities. “But it should come as no surprise: after years of bombardment with the notion that the ‘gender binary’ is false and oppressive, and encouragement to explore whether they’re male, female, both, or neither, lo and behold, the number of teens with recent-onset discomfort with their sex is up 4,000 percent,” Grossman said.

Once again, a root of the chaos lies in the words used to alter the students’ perceptions of themselves and reality. Those words betray the truth and fail our children.

Not to be deterred, Grossman said in the introduction of her Trans Nation book, “I want the following truths—recognized by everyone on the planet aside from gender studies professors and grad students until about two weeks ago—to be acknowledged in the first pages of this book: Sex is not assigned at birth; it’s established at conception. Brains always match the bodies to which they are attached; we are not Legos or Mr. Potato Heads that might be improperly assembled. Sex is binary. Sex is permanent. Males cannot become females and females cannot become males.”

Though she worries about being investigated or losing her license, given President Biden’s executive order to end “non-affirming therapy,” she perseveres in speaking the truth and “helping patients to accept themselves.”

Grossman’s concern is understandable. Most U.S. institutions, including the highest levels of government, have been captured by the transgender movement and its distortion of language. America is in the grip of what Grossman explains as a Castro consensus, “when there appears to be agreement about an issue when in fact, due to extreme polarization and squashing of dissent, there’s no true agreement.”

This war rooted in words feels, at times, unwinnable.

Yet, like Grossman, we must be unafraid. We must be trailblazers for the truth. This starts with the words we say—to ourselves, our children, and within our immediate spheres of influence. We can educate ourselves and share what we learn. We’re sure to lose friends, job opportunities, social acceptance. If we don’t speak up, the transgender movement will continue, as Grossman notes, to erase the distinctions between male and female and “revolutionize what it means to be human.”

For more coverage, see:

On June 21, 2024   /   News You Can Use, Women's Sports   /   Leave a comment

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