The Washington Stand
COMMENTARY: Biden Swamped by Lawsuits Minutes after Upending Title IX
Suzanne Bowdey
It looks like Donald Trump won’t be the only president spending a lot of time in court this summer. Thanks to Joe Biden’s universally despised (and unconstitutionally executed) changes to Title IX, this White House now finds itself on the wrong side of an avalanche of lawsuits. The legal floodgates opened Monday, within hours of the Biden administration finalizing its radical rewrite of 52 years of women’s rights. And conservatives warn: this is just the beginning.
While the Left is betting on abortion to save them at the ballot box this November, they’re ignoring the grassroots fire that’s blazing across the country over the president’s absurd decision to throw away a half-century of girls’ privacy, opportunity, and safety. One by one, the states fired shots across the bow, refusing to implement “the senseless will of Biden and his posse [to] eradicate[e] women,” as Oklahoma Education Superintendent Ryan Walters (R) so colorfully put it. By the weekend, five states had ordered their schools not to comply with the new rule — and more than double that number were preparing to sue.
Monday afternoon, the dominos started to fall in earnest, as groups like America First Legal, Independent Women’s Forum, Alliance Defending Freedom, Parents Defending Education, 14 states, and several of their attorneys general pulled the trigger on multiple lawsuits in all different regions of the country. “We will not comply,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) insisted with determination, “and we will fight back against Biden’s harmful agenda.”
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Down in the Lone Star State, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) echoed the outrage on a different complaint, warning the White House, “Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology. This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality.” His governor reminded everyone that the president had “no authority” to make these sweeping changes that replace biological women with anyone who identifies as transgender.
“We’re not going to pretend there is some kind of other sexual category other than the two the Great Almighty has set forth,” a defiant Governor Jeff Landry (R) told his Bayou State. This White House “has lost its moral compass,” he lamented. His attorney general, Chris Carr, vowed to “keep fighting until we end this absurdity once and for all.”
So far, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia have taken legal action to stop the president from putting America’s daughters in danger. Elite athletes like Riley Gaines cheered them on, knowing that the next shoe to drop will be the erasure of girls’ sports — a move the president has promised but postponed to spare his campaign the political backlash.
“The president and his administration can’t act like they care about women or our opportunities and then go and wipe out women’s protections under the country’s landmark sex equality law,” Gaines argued on her Outkick podcast. “Title IX was passed over 50 years ago to end unjust discrimination in education, including athletics. I experienced this law [being] undermined when female athletes like myself were told to keep quiet when a male swimmer took home a title in the women’s division and deprived female athletes of awards, honors, and the opportunity to compete.”
Fortunately, “States saw this coming and are swiftly organizing to challenge the Biden administration’s illegitimate Title IX rule,” Doreen Denny, senior advisor for Concerned Women for America, told The Washington Stand. “Biden’s radical mandate to overturn the fundamental understanding of ‘sex’ in civil rights law cannot stand. Biden’s Title IX rule forces schools to prioritize self-proclaimed ‘identities’ over protections against discrimination for male and female students. Women and girls are stripped of their basic rights to single-sex spaces and privacy in restrooms and locker rooms. Courts cannot sit idly by on this one. These lawsuits have merit and must prevail to protect students and the rights of educators and parents working to shield them from gender radicalism.”
On Capitol Hill, the backlash took another turn as Biden’s secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, took a turn in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee Tuesday on a range of issues. Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) wasn’t about to let the opportunity to grill Cardona about this transgender overreach pass by, and, in a testy exchange, the controversial cabinet official seemed shockingly indifferent about its impact on tens of millions of girls:
SENATOR HYDE-SMITH: What does your department have to say about how this rule would impact biological females? I’m thinking specifically about how it will allow transgender students to choose any bathroom, any locker room if they wish — therefore eliminating the safe spaces for women and even pushing women out of athletics all together. Do you agree that they are eliminating those safe spaces?
MIGUEL CARDONA: I don’t, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve been an educator for about 25 years, and it’s the role of educators to make sure students have the safety and privacy that they need and take into account the perspectives of different students. You know, senator, we cannot pick and choose which students we want to protect. All students deserve protection in our schools, and what this Title IX rule does is ensure that all students — including our LGBTQI students — are protected.
HYDE-SMITH: So when a biological man goes into a bathroom with a biological female, do you think that’s a safe space for those girls?
CARDONA: … You may not be recognizing students who are transgender, but because you don’t recognize them doesn’t mean I don’t protect them.
HYDE-SMITH: (Repeated the previous question, then added:) “You have no problem with that and you consider that being safe in all circumstances?”
CARDONA: I think the line of questioning is trying to create division. What we’re trying to do is protect all students.
HYDE-SMITH: We’re not trying to create division. You just said, ‘Protecting students is my number one priority.’
CARDONA: Yes, all students.
HYDE-SMITH: So do you feel like that those biological females are protected in that setting to the best of your ability you’re protecting them?
CARDONA: The Title IX regulations that we have protect all students and give them access to the same opportunities as all other students have in our schools. As I said before, we can’t pick and choose which students we protect.
HYDE-SMITH: I totally agree. All students need protecting, but there’s a difference in boys and girls and where they change clothes and undress. Do you agree with that?
CARDONA: Schools make rules on how to make sure students are safe and have privacy in our schools. We’ve been doing this — educators have been doing this — and the Title IX rules just reinforce the work they also have to do to protect students who are LGBTQI who have unfortunately historically in our country been under attack.
HYDE-SMITH: No one is attacking anyone right now. We are talking about school safety in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms. Nobody’s trying to attack anyone. We want all students safe—
CARDONA: We do—
HYDE-SMITH: So you don’t need to change the conversation that somebody’s attacking someone. So your position is they’d still have the safe spaces they deserve when biological girls are undressing. That is your position?
CARDONA: It is my honor as an educator to protect students who have been marginalized in our community and because of that require additional mental health support. I’m not saying you’re attacking them. I’m saying that they are under attack in this country, and as secretary of Education it is my responsibility to protect all students — not just some of them.
HYDE-SMITH: In the same breath that you say safety is number one.
In the same hearing, Senator Katie Britt (R-Ala.) talked about being at her daughter’s track sectionals this pass weekend and how she witnessed with her own eyes “the differences and the disparities between the top female athletes and then the top male athletes.” “They were significant,” she insisted.
“I want to make it very clear,” Britt continued, “I believe we are all made in the image of God, and I believe each and every person should be treated with dignity and respect — but Title IX was created to create fairness, to create a level playing field, to give women the opportunity to strive to grow and to succeed. And when I look at the reality of your new Title IX proposal, it clearly shows that that playing field is about to be tilted.”
She talked about the 1988 Olympics and how superstar Florence Griffeth Joyner had set a record for the 100- and 200-meter dash but pointed out that “in 2019 that record would have been beaten by 76 biological high school males.” “My question to you is,” Britt pressed, “how are we going to continue to create fairness if you are tilting the playing field?”
Cardona thanked the Alabaman for her “passion” then refused to answer her. But he and the president’s team will have no such luxury before the courts, where the administration’s abuse of power will be front and center. Until then, Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon told TWS, we can all be thankful for the brave men and women across the country who refuse to watch their daughters sacrificed on Biden’s dangerous altar to transgenderism.
“I am so grateful to those who have filed lawsuits and those who will do so,” she said. The Biden administration is trying to force “California/Oregon/Washington-style progressivism on states like Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana,” Kilgannon argued. The left-wing states that “have already adopted dangerous and sexist practices like those mandated by the Biden administration will not have to worry about losing federal funding. States that refuse to kowtow to LGBT, Inc. are the ones in jeopardy,” she warned.
But based on the fury unleashed over this White House’s extremism, so is the president. Voters see who’s waging war on women and girls, and most of them will tell you: the last thing they want is to spend the next four years fighting for rights they’ve already won.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.