Issue: Sex + Gender

This op-ed was written by May Mailman, director of Independent Women’s Law Center. This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner.

After considerable delay, President Joe Biden’s administration published its massive regulation abusing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. While it generally redefines the law’s prohibition on “sex” discrimination to require treating students in accordance with their “gender identity,” the regulation at first glance appears to leave athletics alone. The regulation says that while males must generally be permitted into women’s spaces, the long-standing athletics regulation (allowing sex-separate teams) will remain in place.  

But the Independent Women’s Forum is suing the Biden administration to protect female athletes from its Title IX regulation. Because let’s be clear: The new regime unquestionably destroys women’s sports. And that destruction violates Title IX.

To start with some basics, Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in any educational program that accepts federal funds, from daycare to doctoral programs. In prohibiting sex discrimination, Title IX explicitly recognizes that men and women are different. Because of those differences, giving women equal educational opportunities sometimes requires women’s-only facilities and organizations. For example, Title IX specifically permits schools to offer single-sex living facilities. And to ensure that women have a meaningful opportunity to compete in athletics, Title IX permits, if not requires, single-sex athletic teams. 

Title IX has been wildly successful. When it was passed, only 300,000 women played high school sports. Now, that number is more than 3.4 million. Sports are an important part of the academic environment, especially for girls. Girls who play sports have higher grades, higher self-esteem, and lower levels of depression — an outcome desperately needed among today’s girls.

Instead of helping women, the Biden administration’s reinvention of “sex discrimination” mandates that men be treated as women (or whatever else) based on claimed gender identity. The administration admits that toilets, locker rooms, and sex-education classes (long permitted to be sex-based for obvious reasons) must now incorporate those who claim exclusion would “harm” them on the basis of their subjective identity. 

Sports are a part of all this. For one, the Biden administration has made clear that Title IX applies to all aspects of the educational experience — including athletics. It has argued in court that Title IX, the law, requires female athletes to accommodate men. In other words, the administration’s position is you can have your women’s sports so long as women’s teams are open to men. Doesn’t really sound like women’s sports to me. 

And even if Biden’s Title IX interpretation permitted single-sex athletic competition, the new Title IX rule would continue to upend women’s sports. And that’s by dismantling the privacy of women’s locker rooms. As Independent Women’s Forum Ambassador Paula Scanlan, a former teammate of Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, has testified, she was forced to undress before Thomas, a 6’4” fully intact biological male, 18 times per week. After voicing her concern to university officials, Paula was told that changing with Thomas was mandatory and reeducation counseling would be available for her to get comfortable with it. This abusive story will now play out in locker rooms across the country. 

The far-reaching, illegal, and immoral Title IX regulation sets women back. It devastates women’s spaces, degrades womanhood to a stereotypical state of mind, and elevates male emotions over the real barriers women historically and presently face in educational settings. And yet, common sense has evaded the upper echelons of the Washington bureaucracy, requiring the judiciary, in response to our lawsuit, to clarify once again for our president and his lackeys how laws work. 

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner.

Last week, Fairfax County’s school board members sent an email to the district’s residents soliciting feedback in a survey on the proposed changes to the family life education curriculum.

The school board’s appointed Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee members’ recommendations for this year include gender identity instruction in elementary school and an age-inappropriate puberty video for all fourth graders that shares graphic information about the development of both sexes.

Parents were left scratching their heads and wondering why they received another survey about this committee’s recommendations. Respondents to last year’s survey about the advisory committee’s previous proposed changes to the sex education curriculum demonstrated overwhelming community disapproval. But last year’s vile recommendations were passed unanimously in the committee anyway, demonstrating its complete lack of ideological diversity and its disregard for parental input. There were and are conservative applicants for the committee — they are just ignored.

And last year’s recommendations arguably were even more explicitly absurd than this year’s recommendations. They included combining sexes for family life education starting in fourth grade, beginning gender identity instruction in elementary school, and replacing all the words “male/female” with “assigned male/female at birth.”

Parents and community members said, “No way.” In fact, 84% of respondents to the school board’s survey objected to the recommendation that boys and girls should be taught sex education together.

At a work session after these survey results were made public, the district’s superintendent, Michelle Reid, said, “Honestly, the majority doesn’t always dictate, right?”

The truth is that neither the advisory committee nor Fairfax County’s school board members reportedly intended for those survey results to be made public. But along came the Fairfax County Parents Association, the school board’s undesired accountability buddy, to the parents’ rescue. On March 4, 2023, the Fairfax County Parents Association publicized the survey results in a tweet, and likely delayed the school board’s plans to force gender identity down our young children’s throats — for a year, at least.

And here we are again, a year later. Last year’s survey results went against what the school board, its advisory committee, and the district’s administration intended, so they never voted on the recommendations. They seemed simply to hope that time would erase parents’ memories and divert their attention.

In the lead-up to this year’s vote, activist board members likely hope to yield favorable survey results this time around on the proposed changes. To that end, I would bet they will activate the LGBT community inside and outside of Fairfax County to respond to the survey before the deadline on June 10.

The ideological inclinations of this year’s survey’s authors and its intended audience are clear. In addition to other demographic information, the survey poses a question about the respondent’s gender identity. The choices are agender, cisgender, genderqueer, man, nonbinary/gender diverse, transgender, woman, and, in case the extra-special respondents do not identify with any of these, “other” is an option as well.

A concerned Fairfax County resident sent an email to school board Chairman Karl Frisch asking him if the school board would vote on last year’s recommendations in addition to this year’s recommendations and, if so, when they intended to vote. He did not respond before the publication of this article.

For a school board and administration that speaks so much about inclusion, they certainly do have a nefarious way of excluding parental input that thwarts their leftist agenda in our children’s schools.

In the end, it probably doesn’t even matter what the new survey results show. The school board will inevitably vote in favor of forcing gender ideology into the elementary school curriculum regardless of what parents think is appropriate. And that, in a nutshell, is what the Left means by “inclusion.”