A federal district court judge has struck down President Joe Biden’s effort to protect transgender students and make other changes to Title IX, ruling the U.S. Department of Education violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use transgender students’ names and pronouns.
The ruling, which applies nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its final days and to LGBTQ+ advocates.
This is the type of position, effectively a legal assault on girls and women, that lost middle America for the Democrats.
Further, what protections for LGB students were “scrapped”? Once again, the far left is conflating LGB with TQ+ when they’re not the same. No LGB students were diminished by this ruling, and in fact a strong case can be made that lesbian students were very much helped.
The Biden administration rule was released last April and aimed to protect LGBTQ+ students in K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The rule also conferred protections for pregnant students. The update to Title IX, the federal law that forbids sex-based discrimination in education, was expanded to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
In his opinion, Kentucky Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote last week in his opinion that the education department could not expand Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.
Only the most tortured reading of Title IX would include gender identity. Biden’s rule was based on Bostock v. Clayton County (which prohibited employment discrimination against transgender employees). The Bostock ruling specifically noted that the rationale was not to be used in other areas (like Title IX), but Biden did it anyway.
Gender identity refers to the gender that an individual identifies as, regardless of their sex assigned at birth.
“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex — throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless,” Reeves wrote.
I love that the article, republished by the hard left Oregon Capital Chronicle, feels the need to explain what gender identity is, especially since the far left believes in multiple genders (of indeterminant number, since if varies by who you ask). Leaving out this fact is important as it’s one of the nuttier things, among many, that populate the gender identity sphere.
Regardless, Judge Reeves is entirely correct in his reading: If gender identity is anything anyone says it is and if it’s protected by law like sex is, then Title IX means next to nothing.