The Athletics and Gender Identity War

I wonder if the 92nd U.S. Congress ever thought that 50 years into the future some of their peers would hijack Public Law 92-318, attempt to change its meaning, and weaponize it to push an ideology that can only be described as evil. Between the last Congressional House of Representatives and the current Executive Branch, this is exactly what is happening.

Public Law 92-318, which encompasses Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, prohibits federally funded educational institutions from discriminating against anyone based on their sex—that’s a biological male and female to be specific. But in their efforts to change what is basic human biology, elected officials of the current administration want to federally mandate a new scope of what “sex,” under the definition Title IX was written back in the 1970s, means.

The fourth Executive Order signed by President Biden one day after his inauguration did just that. Executive Order 13988 established the Biden Administration’s agenda on defining biological sex—specifically on how it impacts school athletic departments. No longer are school sports safe from biological men, who disguise themselves as, or claim to be, women, from wanting to compete against real women.

So, if you are trying to change the rules in the educational athletics arena in terms of what seems to be obvious biological differences between male and female sports, what do you do? You weaponize the one federal institution that can do that: the Department of Education.

On July 12, 2022, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). The goal of this notice is to change Title IX by proposing that recipients of federal funds will be prohibited from preventing “a person from participating in an education program or activity consistent with their gender identity.”

To oppose this, U.S. Representative W. Gregory Steube (R-FL-17), introduced bill H.R. 734, Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023. The bill specifically calls for the amendment of Title IX by adding what has been known since the creation of mankind, “sex is based on an individual’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”