The Biden administration has prioritized equality from the beginning, often trumpeting the rights of a person born as a boy who wants to live as a girl, or vice versa, over the rights of females and others. This intent became clear on April 6, when the administration announced a new rule, bypassing the legislature and demonstrating a severe overreach of the power of the executive branch, which will upend the interpretation of a law that has ensured equality for women for decades.
Title IX was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 to ensure that female students and employees in education are treated equally. It has set apart and yet preserved female spaces and sports, allowing for privacy, safety, and fairness in athletics.
Biden’s new change to Title IX regulations flips Title IX on its head, adding gender identity to sex — or perhaps worse, morphing the definition of sex to include gender identity — so that now, “policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.”
Biden’s proposed rule is a demonstration of egregious executive overreach, akin to Obama’s Colleague letter or Biden’s own radical student loan forgiveness program, but that part can be reversed with a new President: Live by executive fiat, die by executive fiat.
The worst part of this rule is that Biden seems to be projecting the progressive view of transgender ideology onto the entire country’s federally-funded athletic programs, which would include high school and college sports in a way that most Americans have already said they don’t want.
Title IX was enacted because it was clear, despite the feminist revolution, women did not have equal access to sports programs in public schools and universities. The argument wasn’t necessarily that as many people watch women’s sports as watch men’s, but that they deserve equal funding and access. It’s hard not to quarrel with this and it has stood firm for five decades.
Equating gender identity with sex in order to allow biological males who live as women access to women’s sports — and even further, to suggest that policies that ensure fairness violate the rights of these athletes — is not just unethical and unfair but honestly, silly. There are obvious, innate differences between males and females that affect their athletic abilities and prowess. While men and women should be equal under the law, that doesn’t mean males don’t run faster than women, or kick a soccer ball farther, or land a harder punch. Of course they do. Males possess inherent physiological differences that make their lung capacity larger, their muscles stronger, and even their bones bigger than females.
Biden’s rule ignores all of these obvious differences and suggests that in order to facilitate a truly equal society, biological male athletes living as women must play against them — even as they beat them in the sport — regardless of how this affects females in locker rooms and on soccer fields. The notion is truly ludicrous and harmful to females, whether they’re just now learning to play a sport or they’re an award-winning athlete. Why work hard and compete at their best only to watch a biological male beat them in a race?
While this policy might momentarily provide equal access to biological males hoping to compete on female-only teams, should it take hold, it will slowly erase the beauty of female-only sports teams, any notion of competition, and the safety and privacy of single-sex spaces like locker rooms.
Biden’s new rule proposes to find a way for everyone to be equal through Title IX, one of the most prominent laws that provided girls and women equal access to sports, but in reality, it ensures that biological males will overpower females in sports and over time, erase the concept of single-sex spaces and sports. Biden’s overreach must be called out not only for being an overreach, but being unethical and unfair to women, using the very law meant to help women in the first place.
