The Biden Administration Benches Female Athletes
The Biden administration is poised to complete its radical rewrite of the U.S. Department of Education’s regulations on Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education. To label the administration’s proposed changes as highly controversial would be an understatement. One seismic change would expand Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination in education to include “gender identity”—a fundamental reworking of Title IX that would be catastrophic for female athletes.
After the 2020 elections, close observers expected the incoming administration to dismantle the due process and free speech Title IX rules finalized by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in May 2020. In regulations proposed in 2022, the Biden administration proposes not only to gut those reforms but also to bar gender-identity discrimination, which, notably, it fails to define in the proposed rules. (For a glance at gender identity’s many permutations and the endless headaches awaiting America’s educational institutions, interested readers should consult the always helpful, DEI-compliant Wikipedia, which includes identities ranging from “Abinary” to “Xenogender.”)
With the 2022 proposal, President Biden would have the federal government compel schools, colleges, and universities to allow biological males who “identify” as females to compete against female athletes. This change would affect any education program funded by the Department of Education—public schools, charter schools, higher education, proprietary schools, recreation centers, and the like. Failure to comply would violate the administration’s unfounded interpretation of federal civil rights law and invite investigations, litigation, and the possible loss of federal funds. A half century of progress in women’s and girls’ sports is at stake.
