WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — As states across America — the most recent being Idaho and Indiana — approve bans on “sex changes” for children, the Biden administration is fighting back, announcing this week that it will be expanding new Title TX rules to include “gender identity” under the definition of sexual discrimination in order to block schools and colleges from banning “transgender” athletes from competing in the category of their choice.
The Education Department’s new policy would require any school or college receiving federal funding to reject a “one-size-fits-all” policy or be in violation of Title IX. Title IX is the gender equality legislation enacted in 1972.
According to a Department of Education press release: “The U.S. Department of Education (Department) proposes to amend its regulations implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) to set out a standard that would govern a recipient’s adoption or application of sex-related criteria that would limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female athletic team consistent with their gender identity. The proposed regulation would clarify Title IX’s application to such sex-related criteria and the obligation of schools and other recipients of Federal financial assistance from the Department (referred to below as ‘recipients’ or ‘schools’) that adopt or apply such criteria to do so consistent with Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate.”
The proposal will have to go through an approval process and receive pushback, but if passed, will become a permanent provision of Title IX.
Biden’s proposed policy has been a long time coming, and more than two dozen organizations wrote to the administration this year urging him to reconsider: “The Department does not have the legal authority to issue regulations that would subvert rather than fulfill the requirements of Title IX by permitting or requiring biological males who identify as females to compete in sex-separated women’s sports and to use the intimate facilities and shared spaces of female students … we anticipate that the coming rulemaking on athletics will similarly conflate gender identity with Title IX’s sex-based protections and degrade those very protections.”
The Biden administration appears to have found an unlikely ally on April 6 in the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with a boy identifying as a girl who wants to play on the girls’ middle school track team in West Virginia. The boy, who goes by “Becky” Pepper-Jackson, has been at the center of a legal battle in which West Virginia officials blocked him from playing with the girls. An appeals court blocked that decision with a temporary injunction, which West Virginia appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court declined the state’s request to intervene in the case for now. While the current Court is considered to be conservative, the 2020 Bostock ruling — authored by Neil Gorsuch — indicates that the transgender movement has sympathizers on the bench.
The decision earned dissent from Justice Samuel Alito — who authored last year’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade — and Clarence Thomas, who wrote that “this court is likely to be required to address in the near future” the issue of athletes identifying as transgender and whether Title IX or the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits “a state from restricting participation in women’s or girl’s sports based on genes or physiological or anatomical characteristics.”
When that time comes, I suspect that the transgender movement will carry the day, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the liberals on the bench to carry the spirit of Obergefell and Bostock forward.
