Buss: Title IX expansion a true threat to democracy
Kaitlyn BussThe biggest threat to our democracy wasn’t January 6, 2021, and it isn’t election integrity, climate change, MAGA hats, a broken infrastructure or any of the other claims candidates will make this election season.
But it may be the ubiquitous and mandatory redefining of sex and gender throughout societal institutions and the law, most recently, under a Biden administration expansion of Title IX protections.
Little threatens the fabric of America’s families and communities, the essential building blocks of any healthy democracy, like the fundamental reconceiving of male and female by force, which the new rules seek to do.
What began as a movement to increase tolerance for same-sex and trans Americans has ballooned into an all-out attack on the free speech, privacy and equal protection rights of Americans who question those policies.
Acquiescence to the trans agenda — including pronoun use and gender-affirming language — is no longer optional. That’s what the Biden administration effectively said last week as the Education Department extended protections under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal money, to LGBTQ+ and trans people, essentially elevating their potential to be discriminated against above other students.
By equating sex with gender identity, Title IX offers protection for no one but trans individuals who increasingly argue biology and the law must be on their terms — or else.
Born a male but been feeling like a girl? On almost every college campus in America now, that means you can use the women’s locker room if you want to — and the women in it can’t protest your presence or anatomy.
“The final regulations further recognize that preventing someone from participating in school (including in sex-separate activities) consistent with their gender identity causes that person more than de minimis harm,” the rules now say. That includes men who are sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman or by wearing women’s clothing, and experience that in a women’s bathroom. The very statute designed to protect women can now be used against them.
But the Title IX expansions go beyond women and bathrooms.
If you are a young man on campus accused of rape or sexual harassment, you are again losing your due process rights, including the current requirement to hold a hearing with the opportunity to cross-examine your accuser. That is, unless you are a man who identifies as a woman and the harassment, disputed or not, occurred in a women’s locker room. In that case, you could get off free.
It should be obvious the confusion that could ensue.
Under the new rules, faculty, staff and students will be required to use gender-affirming pronouns. And biological males will be allowed to compete with and for the same financial resources reserved for biologically female athletes.
These changes will have massive implications and are political rocket fuel.
A majority of Americans say they would favor or strongly favor policies that require transgender athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, according to Pew Research. Forty-one percent would somewhat favor policies requiring transgender individuals to use public bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth, and 31% would at least somewhat oppose these policies.
There are certainly threats to our democracy. But it’s hard to find one that matches forcing Americans to abide by the increasingly aggressive trans agenda in education and insisting they stand silent and watch the collateral damage.