New Biden administration rules snub same girls Title IX meant to protect

There’s an expression I heard often growing up: “We’re all girls.” It’s frequently stated in an organized setting among children and adolescents. I heard it in locker rooms, at summer camp, the bathhouse at the public pool, and school field trips, almost always during those uncomfortable moments when a group of us had to change clothes or shower in front of each other.

“We’re all girls” was what the women in charge of us said to ease our feelings of awkwardness and insecurity. It didn’t erase them, but it was a reminder that during those brief moments when we didn’t have privacy from each other, our privacy was still intact through each other. Every other body in that room with sensitive parts its person was hesitant to expose belonged to someone like us: another girl.

That we were all girls was our comfort — and as long as it was all girls in the locker room, most of us felt safe in those moments of undress while we changed into and out of our swimsuits and gym clothes and band uniforms and dance costumes. Those moments and those feelings are part of every female’s experience growing up. Female readers, you know this.

(Male readers, you have your own bathroom/locker room culture. You know this. I, unfortunately, know this. My male friends told me stories. You’re animals.)

Many of the moments and feelings that are part of the female experience growing up happen in a school setting.

Over a half-century ago, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 was implemented in part to ensure that any federally-funded education program did not discriminate against any person “on the basis of sex.” Most of us know Title IX as the policy that blazed a trail for girls’ high school and collegiate sports long before female college superstars were selling out huge arenas and signing multimillion dollar endorsement contracts.

Many also know it extends well beyond girls’ athletics. Title IX covers pretty much any area of the educational experience at a federally-funded institution in which a student could face sex discrimination, from sexual harassment by a 7th-grader to sexual assault on college campuses to being treated differently due to pregnancy or marital status.

Its reach is vast, and its legacy undeniable. But now, over a half century after its creation, the Biden administration has released new rules on enforcement of Title IX that fly in the face of the law’s intent by widening the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity, thus rendering the definition of sex meaningless.

With the stroke of a pen, a person’s sex ceases to be the fixed and immutable physiological classification we know it to be. Instead, it becomes … well, whatever one wants or believes it to be.

Though originally part of a single proposed change, the damage will come in two sections, each likely to be challenged in court. The original version of the proposed rule changes included sweeping requirements that would supersede any state laws prohibiting transgender students from playing on a sports team consistent with their gender identity. That includes Iowa’s 2022 law limiting eligibility to girls’ sports teams to the type of girls soon to be formerly known as “females.” It also raises questions about whether college-level women’s sports governing bodies would be forced to allow transgender players on women’s teams.

The rule regarding sports eligibility has been separated from the original proposed changes and its implementation delayed — conveniently, until after the November election. That’s likely not a coincidence.

Let’s be honest — approval ratings, swing state polls and voter enthusiasm indicate President Joe Biden’s re-election is far from assured. Any pendulum effect from 2020 is gone, and not every voter who despises Trump is willing this time to opt for the guy who told a public audience just last week that his uncle might have been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.

Clearly, it’s better for the Biden campaign if the Biden administration holds off on the most politically damaging part of the Title IX changes. More than two-thirds of Americans — a growing number — believe transgender athletes should only be allowed to play for teams that match their sex. They will see such a change as an attack on women’s sports — just as they begin to reach unprecedented levels of popularity.

The rest of the new Title IX rules don’t get the punt. They’re scheduled to take effect Aug. 1, and they could define a “sex-based hostile environment” that would constitute sexual harassment to be something as simple as declining to use a transgender student’s chosen pronouns if it’s deemed “subjectively and objectively offensive to a student and to a person in the school community” and “rises to the level that it limits or denies access to education,” according to an official with the Department of Education on an April 19 press call.

That would also ensure that a transgender student would be entitled to use a restroom or locker room that corresponds with their gender identity and not their sex, undoing any state law or policy that assigns use of those facilities based on sex, including Iowa’s 2023 law doing the same.

The justification of allowing a trans student to choose their setting stems from the notion that forcing them to use restrooms and locker rooms in which they feel uncomfortable inflicts harm on them. Should a trans student with a male body opt to use the girl’s locker room, there’s no consideration for the female students who are uncomfortable. Not even when that discomfort disrupts their own educational experience.

How will the school accommodate those uncomfortable female students? When the Linn-Mar Community School District in Marion implemented its now-defunct gender identity policy in April 2022, the best the district was able and willing to offer was a curtain, a nearby restroom, someone’s private office, or a separate changing schedule. Suggesting that a trans student use those same accommodations if they were uncomfortable using facilities corresponding with their sex wasn’t only impermissible, it was a cardinal sin.

I don’t believe that a gender nonconforming kid should be ignored in all of this. Nor do I pretend for a second to have the answers on how to accommodate a student who feels they need to dress in facilities created for the sex opposite theirs — without forcing it on the other students who would be uncomfortable with it.

But the policymakers in the Biden administration obviously don’t have the answers, either. What they fail to grasp is that these new regulations which will mandate that every public education institution in the U.S. allow students to use whatever restroom corresponds with their gender identity will do nothing further to solve the problem. They only transfer the problem to a different — and undoubtedly larger — group: girls.

When it’s students with male bodies entering spaces previously reserved for females, it’s those girls whose educational experience suffers — an experience shaped at the very same time by the happenings of the developing female body. Those can be downright terrifying. I know. I’ve been there. Every girl goes through it. Only girls go through it. And only those of us with female bodies and female brains can understand it.

A person with a male body can’t understand the female experience of dreading gym class now that boys have started starting at her chest when she runs laps.

A person with a male body can’t understand a female’s shock when she sees the blood and realizes she’s menstruating for the very first time. They can’t understand what the cramps feel like. They have no idea how messy it can be to insert or change a tampon.

A person with a male body can’t understand how personally objectifying it feels when a dawns on a girl that almost all of the mature content in movies and television is of women’s bodies.

A person with a male body can’t understand how mortifying it is when a girl stands up at the end of class and feels the blood gushing between her legs. Or how nervous she feels while she stuffs a big wad of toilet paper in her underwear, hoping it will last until she gets off the bus. They’ve never had a friend walk up behind them urgently and whisper to them, “I think you’re having an accident,” They can’t know what it feels like for a female to tie a jacket around her waist to cover her behind and hold her backpack to cover her front.

If any of that made you uncomfortable, you’re probably male.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com