Biden Admin’s War on Women

The early Friday morning release of the Department of Education’s new administrative rewrite of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act—you know, the one that dealt with women’s rights—shows us that the left’s boast of protecting women is a sick joke. Title IX stated, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” By changing the terms of the law from “sex,” a category grounded in biology, nature, reality, to “gender identity,” a category grounded in mere will, the Biden Administration has indicated that they are waging a war on women that will wreck women’s sports and endanger women at every age. That it is also destructive to men and children is no consolation.

That might sound strange to people who get their information from the so-called mainstream media sources whose “mainstream” label is accurate but often misunderstood: their task is to mainstream Democratic Party and leftist ideas. For years now, they have forwarded the Democratic Party propaganda about a supposed “Republican War on Women.” This war on women supposedly consisted of defending the “gender wage gap,” by which women were supposedly being paid 77 cents on the dollar for the same work men do; attacking “reproductive rights”; and refusing to take seriously the protection of women from the sexual predations of men.

The first two are simply based on misunderstandings and lies. The “gender wage gap” is clearly nonsensical. If large corporations could really hire women to do the same work as men for nearly a quarter less in remuneration, women would be the only ones ever hired. But the claim has been debunked in data-based analyses many times over. Women do earn less than men overall because they make different choices about both work and family.

The language about a war on “reproductive rights” is a euphemism for something that is very ugly. Democrats have no interest in reproduction. They mean by this solely the means of not reproducing, especially the means of killing children in the womb. Given that the consistent trend of views about abortion, as, for instance, measured by Gallup, shows that women are more pro-life than men, it would be more appropriate as a matter of both reality and public policy to say that on this issue, Democrats are waging war on women.

But the biggest lie Democrats tell is about their supposed protection of women. And that lie is now fully exposed with the new Title IX guidelines. By adding “gender identity” to the list of protected classes under the Civil Rights Act, the new rules will pressure schools—public and private—at all levels to allow males who identify as females to be allowed into restrooms, locker rooms, and sleeping spaces reserved to women or risk lawsuits.

That’s not all, of course. Not only will women, their daughters, and their granddaughters not be able to have a space to go to the restroom, change, or sleep without men being present. Academic scholarships, programs, and even women’s colleges will have to be open to males claiming to be females. And schools that refuse to accept officially these claims to be female and use pronouns that do not correspond to sex—or even schools that protect their employees’ and students’ rights not to accept such claims and not to use pronouns that do not correspond to sex–​will themselves be open to litigation. So too the schools that inform parents of so-called “gender transitions” their children are undergoing, often with the applause and under the influence of teachers and school staff. Indeed, that these rules will be used to defend and enforce gender ideology curricula is fairly obvious. Young women and men must be taught not only that they might be born “in the wrong body,” but also that they can fix this supposed problem.

It’s incredibly ironic, as many have observed, that this rule is released only a few weeks after the U.K.’s Dr. Hilary Cass released her review of the scientific literature on so-called “gender affirming” care for young people” care for young people—a review showing that very little credible evidence exists to justify puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other physical interventions into young people’s sexual development.

Just as the science has come in—not only not “settled” in favor of this program, but actually against it—we have an Education Department setting rules that will put pressure in favor of it.

Given that this is an election year and Joe Biden is not, to say the least, a safe bet this time around, the final version of the rewrite does not explicitly address the question of males participating on athletic teams even though an earlier draft did. In terms of politics, this may be smart. Americans are overwhelmingly aware that allowing men to compete against women is unfair.

Letting American girls and women lose to males (who were not at the top of the men’s competitions) is a gross miscarriage of justice. It’s no wonder it wasn’t stated outright. But, let’s face it, how else can one interpret the rule that deals with the “benefits of…any education program or activity”? Sarah Parshall Perry, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, observed Friday that if the explicit statement isn’t there about teams, it doesn’t have to be: “The rule contains 31 references to athletics, and dictates that there can be no discrimination on the basis of gender identity in, among others, a school’s extracurricular activities. So yes, your daughter’s volleyball team, lacrosse team, swim team, basketball team, softball team, is now open to boys who identify as girls.”

And who doubts that the explicit rule on this subject, suppressed in the final edition, will be brought out if the Biden Administration is returned this fall? Perry noted that Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, was asked directly if the explicit rule was still going ahead. She refused to answer.

That tells us all we need to know. 

Of course, there’s much more in the 1577-page set of rules. Some of it is specifically dangerous to men, who are more likely to be accused of sexual misconduct. The rules retain some of the language of equal protection for those accused of sexual assault that were laid out during Betsy DeVos’s time as Secretary of Education under Trump, but, as Bob Eitel, a senior counsel to Betsy DeVos during that time, observed, these are not to be trusted: “It is a sure bet that the campus ‘kangaroo courts’ and ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach to Title IX discipline that plagued schools for so long will now return to campuses.”

Indeed, under the DeVos-era rules, live hearings were required such that the accused could face their accusers and have a cross-examination. Under the new rules, live hearings are merely allowed, “but they’re optional and carry new limits. Students must be able to participate from hearings remotely, for example, and schools must bar questions that are ‘unclear or harassing.’” As an alternative, accused and accuser can be interviewed separately.

Is there a Republican “War on Women”? There doesn’t seem much real evidence for that claim. But with these new rules coming out, we know that there is a Democratic one. Will some of it be struck down by the courts? We can hope so. One of the dangers is that the rules cite Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in the infamous Bostock vs. Clayton County decision, which applied “gender identity and sexual orientation” to employment discrimination as laid out in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. If Justice Gorsuch does not wake up to the problems he created with that ill-considered opinion, there may be trouble ahead.

For now, two things are clear. First, to protect women, children, and men, red states will have to use every means necessary to protect against the enforcement of these new rules until sanity can be vindicated in the courts or the elections. And, second, whatever one thinks of the Republicans or even Donald Trump, to vote for the Democrats now is to vote to erase our human nature as male and female. And that erasure means real damage to American society. It’s a danger to children and to young men, but especially to women’s safety, privacy, and sports. There is a real “War on Women,” and Democrats and the Biden Administration are waging it.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @davidpdeavel.