What can we expect from the Trump Administration on Title IX?
One hopes Trump will immediately undo the damage inflicted by Biden’s Education Department, including rescission of the Title IX rule issued in April, already enjoined by federal courts in over half the country. The usual suspects will make the usual noise and claim Trump is “anti-woman” and taking away rights, but if Trump focuses on ending sexual identity politics to restore learning, he will be removing controversy and Title IX abuses, not causing them.
Title IX is the 1972 Congressional ban on sex discrimination in federally funded education.
Called an equal access law for women, it was an outgrowth of equal opportunity initiatives based on race that were popular in the 1960s.
But Title IX soon became the weapon of choice for feminists in government. They quickly interpreted it as requiring identical funding for female sports even when women weren’t interested and even as this decimated men’s teams. Then, they redefined “discrimination” to encompass “harassment” and “a hostile environment,” still nebulous terms that many define as subjective offenses, which are anybody’s guess, as the offense changes with the subject. This also makes healthy courtship a minefield since any romantic gesture, such as holding open a door, can offend someone and become a Title IX complaint. Then they expanded “harassment” to include alleged sexual assault, a matter of criminal law at the state level, not civil rights law from Congress. But that didn’t stop Obama education officials from directing campus Title IX offices to seek, find, and punish anyone merely accused of sexual misconduct by presuming guilt—an egregious violation of due process. Hundreds of students were suspended or expelled by what were then called campus kangaroo courts.
Biden officials continued this abuse of Title IX by redefining the law’s central term “sex” to include same-sex orientation and “gender ideology” such that homosexuals and men pretending to be women (especially on women’s sports teams) could claim a Title IX violation when others did not approve or go along.
The silver lining in this radicalization has been the inevitable pushback. Regular citizens have now woken up and are fighting back. For example, Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reversed the abuses of the Obama administration, stopping campus kangaroo courts by issuing a formal Title IX rule that protected due process for the accused but also mandated support for any accuser. The DeVos rule received an unprecedented 125,000 public comments during the rulemaking process—most positive—showing widespread public support for ending Title IX due process nightmares. What’s more, when the DeVos rule was challenged in court, it was upheld as lawful and fair by every judge to review it.
But Biden targeted the DeVos rule out of the gate in 2021 and then devised its own regulation, which includes the redefinition of sex. Unlike the DeVos rule, however, when the Biden regulation was challenged in court, it was found unlawful and unconstitutional (as administrative overreach), findings affirmed by the United States Supreme Court last August. As a result, it’s been enjoined in 26 states but applies in the remaining 24 where no lawsuits were filed.
So America is now a Title IX patchwork, ready to be remedied by President Trump.
How?
On Inauguration Day, Trump should announce his intention to re-issue the DeVos rule and rescind the Biden regulation, citing the many federal court opinions on the latter’s unlawfulness. Trump’s Justice Department should also file Statements of Interest in the pending cases, informing the courts that the Department won’t be defending Biden’s actions.
The Trump Education Department should also declare as null and void all Title IX Resolution Agreements between the Biden Education Department and individual schools.
Many of these agreements are of highly questionable legality, as they appear to be the result of politically motivated investigations and, worse, impose conditions not authorized by law. For example, California’s Taft College was investigated for an alleged Title IX offense when faculty did not use female pronouns demanded by a male student who enrolled as a male. The faculty’s refusal to use pronouns was never a Title IX offense. The college should therefore not have even been investigated.
Worse, the resulting Resolution Agreement requires faculty to use these pronouns—what is called compelled speech and is illegal—as if Title IX required it, though Title IX does no such thing. Worse still, Biden officials knew this since they were in the process of issuing a rule that made this very change. In short, Biden officials fraudulently treated their ideological goals as law and imposed them on Taft College.
School districts are also targeted and subjected to legally questionable agreements with ideologically driven and expensive terms. The forthcoming report on the Education Department by the National Association of Scholars titled Wasteland: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity and Radicalism, describes numerous such agreements with onerous conditions unauthorized by law and yet treated as binding legal precedent by the Biden Education Department. For example, the Resolution Agreement with the Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota required the district to hire consultants and experts to “examine the root causes of discrimination” and to hire Diversity Directors and Directors of “Positive School Climate.”
Trump should make sure that all this gets the ax.
All that said, America should not kid itself that radicalization and the imposition of fringe sexual politics on schools are limited to Title IX. Unfortunately, sex (and race) identity politics are everywhere in American education. They lurk behind a myriad of buzzwords and phrases such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (“DEI”), “marginalized communities,” “underrepresented minorities,” and so on. Student conduct codes feature these terms along with policies on discrimination and harassment, which are variously defined and changing every day. Teachers and school staff from politicized teachers’ colleges have been fed this politicized content for years, and they feel entitled to impose it on students and unsuspecting families as part of their job.
In fact, if academic assessments are any indication, they view it as their whole job. Last month, the “Trends in International Math and Science Studies,” or TIMSS survey, was published, showing declines among American students in math and science, similar to declines documented in other areas such as English, writing skills, and reading comprehension. It is not hyperbole to say that indoctrination has replaced education in most American schools.
Trump should therefore act with confidence and resolve to shut down Title IX ideologies to restore real learning and academic excellence. He will be a hero not only to parents but to the entire country.
