Biden’s ‘Divisive’ and ‘Invasive’ Title IX Proposal Blocked in 6 More States

In late April, conservatives said President Joe Biden stirred the pot when he “radically rewrote” Title IX to favor biological males who identify as transgender over biological girls. Often referred to as a “groundbreaking” law, Title IX and its prohibiting of sex-based discrimination in education notably paved the way for the transformation of women’s sports. And yet, for a law that has historically been viewed as a protection for girls in sports, Biden’s expansion of Title IX to students who identify with the LGBT agenda seems to have raised numerous concerns as to just how protected biological females are.

Set to take effect in August, Biden’s rule change was instantly met with nationwide backlash. As the Associated Press reported, “Attorneys general in more than 20 Republican-led states have filed at least seven legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s new policy.” And the most recent example of pushback is the decision from Federal Judge Danny C. Reeves in Kentucky, who is the latest judge to block Biden’s Title IX expansion.

This latest development came Monday, only days after another judge blocked Biden’s proposal in the states of Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Montana. The result of Reeves’s action now means Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia are included on the list of states where Biden’s new rule will temporarily not take effect. According to Fox News, the decision was handed down “after a West Virginia girl and a Christian Educators Association International sued after a transgender teen competed on a middle school team.”

In his injunction, Reeves referred to Biden’s regulation as “arbitrary in the truest sense of the word,” a sentiment echoed by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman (R), who said in a statement, “The judge’s order makes clear that the U.S. Department of Education’s attempt to redefine ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ is unlawful and beyond the agency’s regulatory authority.”

Riley Gaines, a former All-American swimmer and prominent figure in the fight to protect women’s sports, shared on X, “This is a huge win. The gender ideology house of cards is falling fast.” She added, “For now, women’s sports are protected in 10 states.” Some in the comments weighed in, with one user saying, “That’s great news! Now let’s get all the states on board.” Another person wrote, “This is music to my ears. I hope this can be driven to the Supreme Court so that eventually the changes that [Joe Biden] is trying to make to Title [IX] will be stopped in all 50 states! Big big win!”

Despite the celebration, the question remains: What does this ruling mean moving forward? Family Research Council President Tony Perkins asked Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) this question on Monday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” Ultimately, she summarized, these recent rulings mean “the federal government can’t take any action against the state of Louisiana or any of our partner states under our injunction. … Those states are also protected from any adverse action by the federal government for noncompliance with their regulations. They simply can’t enforce them in our states.”

In other words, Perkins noted, it’s “going to be very unworkable … for the Biden administration” to continue pushing their ideology through these Title IX changes when “potentially half the states in the country are going to have injunctions against the implementation of these rules.” Could this mean, Perkins wondered, that this issue is “something that the Supreme Court is ultimately going to have to weigh in on?” According to Murrill, that is more likely now than ever.

As she explained, it “was politics that drove” the Biden administration to make these proposed changes, and “I don’t think they ever believed they would get away with this.” But regardless of what led to this point and where it will ultimately end up, Murrill emphasized, “[A]t the end of the day, it is very divisive for our country.”

She continued, “I don’t think there’s any Republican attorney general or governor that … hasn’t filed suit over this. It has enormous implications for our states.” Murrill also went on to explain that there’s a lot of money tied into Title IX for the states. “There’s I think $16 billion in Title IX money just in Louisiana for next year,” she said, and with numbers that high, “no one can afford to face the threat of losing their Title IX money.” But another “part of the problem,” she explained, is that Biden’s proposal “forces us to then enforce this ideology all the way down to kindergarten and even preschool,” so long as the school is attached to Title IX money. “So, it’s incredibly invasive, it’s very punitive, and it’s extremely threatening to our funding.”

Perkins noted that Title IX, while it’s crucial in the realm of sports, “is not just about sports.” It’s also about “invading private spaces of women.” Biden’s proposal to expand the protections of Title IX to LGBT-identifying people “is designed to really erase male and female as distinctions, he warned. Murrill agreed, highlighting the fact that this exclusion of biological realities from “the equation” directly puts women in harm’s way in some of “our most privates spaces.” All of this, she concluded, is the Biden administration’s “effort to impose … [an] ideology.”

In comment to The Washington Stand, Meg Kilgannon, FRC’s senior fellow for Education Studies, shared, “What bothers me most about the mainstream coverage is the frame that these aggressive, socially irresponsible, and dangerous policies proposed by the Biden administration are ‘protective.’ Nothing is further from the truth.”

Kilgannon explained that these regulations “harm women and girls; they harm men and boys, [and] they reduce the human person to a collection of body parts for assembly and reassembly.” Ultimately, she stated, “As Christians, we know we are fearfully and wonderfully made, each person [is a] unique and unrepeatable gift from God. If children are suffering distress, the policies offered by President Biden are NOT a solution, but rather, they are simply a means of furthering distress and disintegration of people and culture.”