On Thursday, the Biden Administration’s Department of Education (ED) announced its proposed changes to Title IX, the civil rights law originally intended to prevent gender-based discrimination in public education, so that the law would forbid “categorical bans” on so-called “transgender” athletes competing in the wrong gender’s sports.
As the Daily Caller reports, the proposed guideline changes would be prohibited from implementing “one-size-fits-all” policies that limits males to male sports and females to female sports.
“One-size-fits-all policies that categorically ban transgender students from participating in athletics consistent with their gender identity across all sports, age groups, and levels of competition would not satisfy the proposed regulation,” the fact sheet released by the ED declares. “Such bans fail to account for differences among students across grade and education levels. They also fail to account for different levels of competition — including no-cut teams that let all students participate — and different types of sports.”
The policy proposal further adds that public schools must consider “fairness in competition” and preventing “sports-related injury” when crafting policies that focus on creating sports teams.
The Biden Administration had already proposed similar changes to Title IX in June of 2022, ordering public schools to allow students to use gender-designated facilities, including restrooms and locker rooms, based on their personal preferences rather than their actual gender.
Parents’ rights groups and other critics condemned the latest proposed change, which essentially circumvents Congress and unilaterally enacts policies at the federal level.
“The Biden Administration is trying to have their cake and eat it too: inject gender identity into athletics while placing the onus upon school districts to determine whether doing so would be problematic or not,” said Nicole Neily, president of the parental rights’ group Parents Defending Education. “Without a doubt, institutions are going to err on the side of ‘inclusion,’ because they fear the wrath of the Education Department – thus, achieving the Department’s end goal while maintaining plausible deniability that they coerced districts into doing so.”
The move by the Biden Administration comes as over a dozen Republican-led states have passed laws banning athletes from competing in the wrong gender’s sport. The most recent state to do so was Kansas, where the Republican-dominated state legislature overrode a veto by Governor Laura Kelly (D-Kan.) on such a bill, thus passing the bill into law.