Kneecapping Title IX
This is a farking outrage.
Biden hands over Title IX to trans people
The Biden administration has finalized new Title IX regulations that codify protections for transgender people, as well as enhance protections for victims of sexual assault or harassment and pregnant people.
What was Title IX? The federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities.
The new regulations officially add “gender identity” onto the list of protections from sex-based discrimination for the first time, though the administration said it has already been applying this standard.
So that will be the end of protections for women.
“…on the basis of sex…”. So says the law. Sex, not gender. And in case there’s any doubt, the exceptions to the law specify “both sexes” in several places (e.g., “this section shall not apply (A) for one year from June 23, 1972, nor for six years after June 23, 1972, in the case of an educational institution which has begun the process of changing from being an institution which admits only students of one sex to being an institution which admits students of both sexes”).
Granted, Title IX was enacted long before the alphabet soup of neo-genders existed, but surely applying it to “gender identity” is going beyond the scope of the act, and is vulnerable to court challenges.
With the fall of Roe v. Wade, Democrats showed that they can’t be counted on to stop Republicans from doing what they want to women’s rights. And so that argument for voting for the lesser evil went pop. With this, they position themselves as enemies of women’s rights. And so they make themselves potentially the greater evil.
It was already rough enough during the midterms choosing between voting for an election denier and a child mutilation supporter on the state level.
Which of these is really the lesser evil again?
Watch the right swoop in and use this as a way to get rid of Title IX altogether. They never liked it, but now they could kill it and claim “feminist” cred! Win-win for the GOP; lose-lose for women.
Okay, this isn’t quite the apocalyptic change everyone seems to think it is.
1: It does NOT have anything to say about trans athletes. Given that Biden was proposing a rule to force schools to allow transwomen on the women’s team a year ago, this may mean the administration is starting to realize that this isn’t the cut-and-dried progressive cause it’s been portrayed as. I’d say watch, wait and keep making enough noise that the Dem party apparatchiks can’t ignore it.
2: The only real affect with regards to trans students or staff appears to be standard non-discrimination stuff. So you can’t deny admittance or hiring based on trans identification. That’s pretty mild, honestly, and not something I disagree with. (I’d be wary of application, of course–saying you can’t fire a trans person because they are trans shouldn’t mean that a trans person is unfireable for cause.)
3: Meanwhile, this also includes undoing a shit-ton of harm that Trump and DeVoss did to Title IX, rolling back a slew of Trump-era changes that made it far more difficult to investigate or punish incidents of sexual assault (among other, similar narrowings of scope that the Great Orange One pushed through). Nullius in Verba, I’d say this directly rebuts your ‘both sides are horrible’ position. Dems have a blind spot; the GOP is an active, deliberate threat.
I can’t see this as anything other than a net win for women and girls. Not an unalloyed victory, but a victory even so.
I’m no expert in Title IX-ese, but that looks awfully like a statement to the effect that any recipient of state funds must not exclude a person from activities consistent with their gender Identity. Unless I’m missing something, and I may, since I’m not reading the whole 1,577 page document, that should apply to trans students and athletic activities.
The summary does include this section:
This might be readable as saying that sex-separate (actual sex, not sex-for-the-purposes-of-these-regulations) living facilities and athletics are permitted, but I’m honestly not sure whether it actually means sex or sex-for-the-purposes-of-these-regulations.
Nullius in Verba:
Granted, a lot will depend on future interpretation. I’m not advocating standing down, here, merely suggesting that the current state isn’t definitively unacceptable.
Keep in mind that any attempt to enforce a broader interpretation of ‘sex’ would likely result in a court battle, though, and this would likely not end well for the gender ideologues right now.
That’s fair. One could certainly dream of a world in which TRA overconfidence and zeal lead into court decisions that favor the sane side.
Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, you’re right. But in the meantime, captured judges in lower courts can screw women over with rulings that employ a trans-compliant interpretation.
I wouldn’t be so sanguine about this failing to specify on sports, since the Boston’s ruling was explicitly not about bathroom access, yet was cited by the Biden administration to grant trans bathroom access.
*Bostock, not Boston.