Today, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody led a group of people who are against the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule proposal.
Biden’s Department of Education recently released planned Title IX changes that try to redefine “sex” to include “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” even though this has been the case for decades.
“The new Title IX rules that Biden wants to make don’t protect women like they did for decades. This crazy idea that girls can be forced to undress with boys in a room that’s supposed to be safe, like a locker room, or that a girl could be randomly paired up with a biological male roommate and have little to no control over the situation is ridiculous. Also, biological men should not be able to get women’s scholarships. “To make sure everyone is safe and treated fairly, Florida will fight Biden hard because he won’t think about the real-world effects of changing rules,” Moody said.
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This law was passed in 1972.
As Moody and the coalition say in their lawsuit, “At the time the law was made, no one doubted that the use of “sex” in it meant biological sex.” And everything that mattered proved what everyone already knew: “sex” in Title IX only refers to biological sex and not gender identity or sexual orientation.
The new rule talks about “limited circumstances” where discrimination based on gender is okay. One thing that is missing from the list of “limited circumstances” is the rule in 34 C.F.R. §106.33 about having separate bathrooms and locker rooms.
Also, the rules could make college women live in shared rooms with biological men.
The alliance says about this lack, “Even though the rule doesn’t directly dismiss §106.33, the Department says that its regulation is invalid and not valid.” They say that rule isn’t based on a “statutory exception” and that they “decline to adopt the Eleventh Circuit’s reasoning in Adams that the statutory carve out for living facilities” supports it. In other words, the rule says that §106.33 is not true without actually taking it back. It also says that it is illegal to keep transgender or nonbinary students from using the bathroom or locker room of the opposite sex.
In its conclusion, the group says, “It is illegal for the challenged rule to change the meaning of “sex” under 20 U.S.C. §1681 to include “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” The courts have to interpret a law’s “words in a way that is consistent with their ordinary meaning at the time Congress passed the law.” United States v. Wis. Cent. Ltd., 585 U.S. 274, 277 (2018). At the time Title IX was made law, there is no proof—and the Department doesn’t offer any—that “sex” meant anything other than biological differences between men and women.
