A controversial Biden administration rule that would force schools and universities to let men into women’s showers, restrooms, and college dorms hit a procedural speedbump from a conservative Republican determined to defend “our daughters’ rights.”
The House of Representatives voted to repeal the Biden administration’s efforts to insert sexual orientation and gender identity into civil rights legislation intended to protect women on Thursday morning, adopting House Joint Resolution 165 by a 210-205 vote along party lines. (10 Republicans and eight Democrats did not vote.) The landmark Title IX bill, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1972, prohibited discrimination against women and created whole categories of women’s sports. The Biden administration’s Department of Education issued a controversial federal regulation on April 29 that would require any school or university receiving taxpayer funds to allow men who identify as women to enter female spaces, including dorm rooms, or lose federal funding.
“Joe Biden and the Democrats are intent on pushing their radical social agenda on American families, who are horrified at the prospect of men entering girls’ athletics and private spaces,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), told The Washington Stand exclusively. “Our daughters and granddaughters have trained for years to compete for scholarships only to have their rightful titles stripped away by biological men. I will not sit idly by while the Left tramples over our daughters’ rights and endangers them.”
“We will overcome evil with good!” declared Miller.
HJR 165 invokes powers of the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that lets Congress cancel bureaucratic rules of which it disapproves. Federal regulations overturned by the CRA “shall be treated as though such rule had never taken effect.” If vetoed, Congress would have to override the veto before the rule could be expunged from the federal register.
“With a stroke of the pen, the Biden administration is making law apart from congressional action, destroying Title IX’s promises of equal opportunity for women, and eliminating single-sex spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, and campus housing for female students from kindergarten through grad school,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) during debate on Wednesday. “You can thank our radical Democrats when your daughter finds out her freshman roommate is actually a man.” But “Democrats would rather [promote] the harm of gender confusion than stand up for women and girls.”
Good noted that sweeping, government-promoted promotion of transgender ideology violates the immemorial teachings of science and the Bible. “This forces schools to adopt progressive Democrats’ radical worldview that sex is something that can change on a whim and is not a God-given scientifically immutable design embedded in our DNA,” he said.
“Biden has led a crusade against biological reality and common sense,” added Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas).
Good called on his colleagues “to nullify the Biden administration’s harmful Title IX rule that for the first time includes sexual orientation and gender identity in the definition of sex.”
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), who led the debate against the normalcy-enforcing resolution, described transgender-identifying people as “two-spirit,” a Native American animist-based religion. “In Judaism, for example, the Talmud, the sacred text, lists six genders,” Bonamici added. The latter assertion was popularized in a New York Times op-ed by a trans-identifying female who now uses the name Elliot Kukla, who is recognized as a rabbi within liberal Reform Judaism. A Heritage Foundation research scholar, Jason Bedrick, said the essay attempted to “distort Judaism to push a radical ideology.”
Bonamici also argued the regulation is “definitely not the first time that the definition of discrimination based on sex included sexual orientation and gender identity, because Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch did exactly that in the Bostock v. Clayton County case.” Yet Gorsuch’s widely-criticized opinion in Bostock noted its narrow application to employment law, declaring, “we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.”
Other Republicans highlighted how the bill would degrade the treatment of women. “The Biden administration’s newly proposed Title IX rule is yet another example of how we are losing our moral compass. This new rule diminishes the undeniable respect that we must as a society extend to women. It completely destroys the distinctions between men and women,” said Rep. Greg Lopez (R-Colo.). “Under this proposed rule, women will be compelled to change with and go to the bathroom next to naked men.”
Bonamici attempted to contrast alleged GOP extremism on the issue and diminish the harm caused by rewriting civil rights laws. Bonamici repeatedly insisted, “The sky is not falling.”
So-called human rights commissions invented civil rights for gay-and-transgender-identifying people which “have been in effect in many states,” said Bonamici. “In fact, people are free from discrimination in those places.” Yet evangelical Christians and others who hold biblical objections to the LGBT agenda — including Christian bakers, elderly florists, and faith-based orphanages — have faced years of costly prosecution for trying to live out their deeply-held religious beliefs.
Bonamici accurately pointed out that “LGBTQ youth and trans youth are more likely to have experienced sexual violence than their straight counterparts.” Some scholars have attributed young people’s self-identification as LGBT to significantly higher levels of childhood molestation and sexual exploitation, especially for men.
Good noted that, although the measure is temporarily blocked in 14 states, “if this resolution isn’t successful today, a majority of American schoolchildren and teachers will suffer under this policy when they return to school next month. This school year we can expect to see more boys joining girls’ sports teams in middle school and high school, thanks to Democrats’ radical progressive policies.”
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) highlighted the potential dangers male athletes pose to their female competitors. “My friend Riley Gaines … talked about how allowing men into women’s sports endangers their physical safety,” said Burchett before reciting a litany of injuries meted out by male athletes competing against females:
- “A high school volleyball player got a concussion.” Payton McNabb of North Carolina reported the injury in November 2022 after a male player who identified as a female spiked the ball in her face.
- “A high school field hockey player had her teeth knocked out.” Video footage posted last November shows a trans-identifying male player for Massachusetts’ Swampscott High School on the hitting the ball into the face of a girl playing for Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High School. Piercing screams can be heard after the impact.
- Additionally, a five-time national amateur women’s boxing champion who now identifies as a man named Patricio Manuel suffered a devastating knockout from the hands of male boxer Joshua Brian Reyes within 21 seconds.
The Biden administration “has completely abandoned them,” said Burchett.
Democrats accused those who oppose allowing men to enter women’s intimate spaces or potentially engage in violent contact sports against females — which represents the majority of Americans — of misogyny. “Republicans are just repeating the lie that they’re standing up for women to hide from their radical anti-woman agenda” asserted Bonamici. She did not specify the content of the GOP’s “anti-woman agenda,” a phrase often applied to efforts to protect children from abortion, the majority of whom are females often killed because of their sex. Democratic have historically opposed laws that prevent gendercide through sex-selective abortion.
House Democrats also denied that the regulation in question impacts women’s sports. The Biden administration, which received “more than 150,000 detailed comments” about its proposed rule on sports, has stated it “will issue its final rule on this standard for criteria for a student’s eligibility to participate on sex-separate athletic teams in the future.” But the rule states, “to restrict students from participating in activities that are not stereotypically associated with the students’ sex could constitute sex-based harassment that creates a hostile environment.” Specifically, “unwelcome conduct based on gender identity” — such as “policies that prevent transgender students from participating in school consistent with their gender identity” — “can create a hostile environment when it otherwise satisfies the definition of sex-based harassment.”
Bonamici insisted Biden’s Title IX rewrite “is going to strengthen protections for girls and women, because it ensures that colleges and universities properly address sexual violence.” The rule erases Trump-era protections establishing due process rights in campus sexual harassment laws. The former rule, enacted in May 2020 by then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, demanded officials presume the accused is innocent until proven guilty, allowed the defendant to see the evidence and have a representative cross-examine witnesses, instituted the more typical “clear and convincing evidence” legal standard in proceedings, and let defendants appeal decisions.
At the time Catherine Lhamon, the former ACLU attorney tapped by Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama to implement transgender policy in public schools and universities, accused DeVos of drawing up revised guidelines which make it “permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” Conservatives say granting any man who identifies as a female access to areas where women disrobe places women at risk of sexual, as well as physical violence.
“Today, our girls are under attack. Our daughters are under attack,” said Rep. Lisa C. McClain (R-Mich.) in a passionate speech. “Do they not have any rights? Do they not have any freedoms?”
Miller’s joint resolution passed Congress by voice vote on Wednesday afternoon, but a formal vote was delayed until Thursday. It now goes to the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it faces a dubious fate. Should it pass the Democrat-controlled body, President Biden would likely veto it.
However, a future Republican president could revoke this rule as early as his first day in office.
TWS reporter Sarah Holliday contributed to this report.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
