(LifeSiteNews) — The Biden administration continued to implement its pro-LGBT education rules even after being rebuked by a federal judge, according to newly-released documents from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC).
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) under former President Joe Biden issued a guidance to educators that its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) interprets Title IX, the longstanding set of rules against sex discrimination in public education, to also cover “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) and will “fully enforce” this interpretation “in education programs and activities that receive Federal financial assistance from the Department.”
Multiple states challenged the administration, and, in July 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee issued a preliminary injunction against the administration. But Fox News reports that a special counsel investigation has “fully substantiated” whistleblower allegations that the Biden DOE-OCR had worked to defy the injunction, via a September 2022 staff email from former ED Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon, who told staff that the department was barred from “implementing” certain documents but “OCR will continue to carry out its statutorily required responsibilities,” and they should simply not rely on the specific disputed documents when defining Title IX.
This, investigators concluded, established a “path for carrying out its preferred SOGI policies” in the states that were party to the injunction, and that regional OCR officials were even directed to act “in defiance” of the block.
“What apparently Biden administration officials and the Department of Education did is say, ‘Hey, we can’t enforce these policies, but the injunction doesn’t reference the content of the policies,’” explained Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Counsel and Vice President of Litigation Strategy Jonathan Scruggs. “The Department of Education was continuing to pressure and enforce these illegal policies. So that means, again, more men in women’s restrooms, redefinition of the meaning of sex in federal law as applied to these school districts.”
Eventually, in June 2024, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor finally ruled that DOE had “engaged in unlawful agency action taken in excess of (its) authority, while failing to adhere to the appropriate notice and comments requirements when doing so,” going beyond a reminder of educators’ existing legal duties into “impos(ing) new duties” that could not be legitimately imposed without going through a proper regulatory review process. The Trump administration has since reversed Biden’s gender rules and adopted a biology-based framework for interpreting “sex”’ in Title IX.
The Biden administration’s rationale flew in the face of both the plain statutory meaning of “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the clear legislative intent of the lawmakers who drafted and passed it, ADF senior counsel John Bursch has argued. “There is little dispute that, in 1964, the term ‘sex’ was publicly understood, as it is now, to mean biological sex: male and female. After all, the term ‘gender identity’ wasn’t even part of the American lexicon at the time. Its first use was at a European medical conference in 1963. And no semblance of it appeared in federal law until 1990.”
Allowing gender-confused individuals to compete in opposite-sex sports is promoted by leftists as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
Critics also warn that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone” use; therefore, “the advantage to [gender-confused men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much, via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, which found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.
In America since the 1980s, more than 1,941 gold medals in female events that would have gone to female athletes have instead been claimed by men identifying as “transgender women,” and along with them more than $493,173 in prize money across more than 10,067 amateur and professional events, according to data compiled by He Cheated and reviewed by Concerned Women for America.