“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” - Title IX, Women's Liberation Movement (1972)
Title IX was a pivotal moment in the fight for equality for males and females, on the basis of sex. Title IX addresses sex-based discrimination in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding. It is designed to provide sex-based rights and protect individuals from discrimination based on their sex – male or female. Under Title IX, schools are required to provide equal opportunities and benefits to both male and female students in all areas, including admissions, athletics, academics, and extracurricular activities. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any form, such as differential treatment, harassment, or exclusion. These rights are essential for promoting a safe and fair educational environment.
The Biden Administration has interpreted Title IX to protect "transgender students" from sex-based discrimination. The U.S. Department of Education has issued guidance indicating that schools should treat students consistent with their "gender identity." This would dramatically broaden the scope of existing Title IX protections. By adding "gender identity" as a protected sex-based category, then "sex" no longer means what it was intended to. If sex and gender are different, then why is there a push to add gender as a subcategory of sex, therefore conflating the two?
The Biden Administration's proposed updates mention that although "sex" was always interpreted to refer to male and female, sex is actually a complicated topic and cannot be properly defined. They also make note that when Title IX was first created, there was no solid specification for what "sex" refers to in the law. That is ridiculous. Sex-based rights always referred to maleness and femaleness, according to corresponding laws and the way they were implemented. The reason why they didn't bother to provide a definition of "sex" in 1972 probably has something to do with the fact that up until three years ago, everybody knew how babies were made. And it was not considered hateful to say that humans cannot change sex. Laws like these are completely dependent on the sex binary because they divide people into two sex classes to address the way that biological sex impacts how they are treated differently and the discrimination that arises from sex differences. Those who disagree with this new interpretation argue that allowing "transgender students" to access the rights and protections reserved for the opposite sex is unfair and may undermine opportunities and privacy rights.
The Biden Administration's decision to add "gender identity" to Title IX led to an avalanche of bills being filed across the nation, many of which directly interfere with the proposed updates. Gays Against Groomers has loudly supported many of these bills and have worked with lawmakers to pass legislation. We primarily have focused on the public school curriculum, female-only sports and spaces in schools, sex harassment guidelines, and child transition. All of these issues are directly related to preserving Title IX in its original form. These bills have been misrepresented in the media and labeled as "anti-LGBTQ+" but all they do is restore common sense and reality. The state of North Carolina recently passed three laws that are consistent with the original interpretation of sex and gender in the law. They were originally vetoed by Governor Cooper, but the vetoes were overridden this week.
Here's the breakdown from our point of view:
Sports and Spaces
"The North Carolina house and senate has now officially overridden the veto of Gov Cooper of HB 574, the Fairness in Women's Sports Act. The bill is now law in North Carolina! It passed with bipartisan support." The passage of Title IX in 1972 meant that by 1973 there were college scholarships at the larger schools, money for equipment and uniforms, and expanded travel schedules. In 1971, fewer than 295,000 girls participated in high school varsity athletics, accounting for just 7 percent of all varsity athletes; in 2001, that number leaped to 2.8 million, or 41.5 percent of all varsity athletes, according to the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education. In 1966, 16,000 females competed in intercollegiate athletics. By 2001, that number jumped to more than 150,000, accounting for 43 percent of all college athletes. In addition, a 2008 study of intercollegiate athletics showed that women’s collegiate sports had grown to 9,101 teams, or 8.65 per school. The five most frequently offered college sports for women are, in order: (1) basketball, 98.8% of schools have a team, (2) volleyball, 95.7%, (3) soccer, 92.0%, (4) cross country, 90.8%, and (5) softball, 89.2%. Since 1972, women have also competed in the traditional male sports of wrestling, weightlifting, rugby, and boxing (Winslow). Girls deserve to compete fairly in their sports without getting beaten by mediocre male athletes and potentially being injured.
This law restores sex-based protections for female athletes to not get hurt in their sports. Allowing male and female students to compete with one another is a safety issue. There have been multiple instances where girls have become injured after playing contact sports against boys. A lot of the women in our organization were tomboys when they were young. If they were growing up today, then they would be at risk of getting injured. Policies and procedures that may affect students' safety or include allowing mixed sex provisions for sports, toilets, changing and overnight accommodation which impacts on other protected characteristics such as sex and religion or belief.
Under Title IX, “institutions may have separate toilet, shower and locker room facilities. And institutions may ‘provide separate housing on the basis of sex.’” Jeldness v. Pearce, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1994). Title IX states that “nothing contained herein shall be construed to prohibit any educational institution receiving funds under this Act, from maintaining separate living facilities for the different sexes.” 20 U.S.C. § 1686. Title IX’s regulations further state that “[a] recipient may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex.” 34 C.F.R. § 106.33.
Thus, under the plain language of Title IX, schools can have separate restrooms, locker rooms, and showers for boys and girls without jeopardizing funding.
Schools were allowing girls to use the same restrooms and locker rooms as their male peers without parental consent. If a girl wanted to identify her way into a facility full of teenage boys, then parents would be left completely in the dark about the fact that their daughter could potentially be in danger. The state of Wisconsin has recently witnessed some "unintended consequences of the proposed Title IX regulations (Brewer, 2023).
Following a swim class during first-hour physical education in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, four freshmen girls rinsed off in the women’s locker room. As was their normal practice, they kept their swimsuits on. But as they were showering, an adult male student entered the locker room, undressed, exposed his genitalia, and showered next to the girls, casually announcing, "I’m trans by the way." While this incident is upsetting, what is perhaps equally concerning is that the district administrators failed to do anything for the girls when they learned what happened (Brewer, 2023).
It is not "anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ" to ensure that girls are safe in their sports and spaces. Some of the people who benefit from these sex-based protections are lesbian and bisexual. Erasing such protections negatively impacts them just as much as it impacts people who are not included in the LGBTQ+ acronym.
Classroom Material
"It’s hard to imagine that just forty years ago, young women were not admitted into many colleges and universities, athletic scholarships were rare, and math and science was a realm reserved for boys. Girls square danced instead of playing sports, studied home economics instead of training for "male-oriented" (read: higher-paying) trades. The school curriculum promoted the idea that girls could become teachers and nurses, but not doctors or principals (Winslow, Barbara)."
SB 49, dubbed the “Parents' Bill of Rights bans instruction on “gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality” in kindergarten through fourth grade. Bills like these include pornographic material in schools and lessons about queer ideology.
Public schools have recently implemented giving children surveys that ask sexual questions and keep a record of students' mental health, which is an invasion of privacy and wildly inappropriate. For instance, they ask students about sexual intercourse and information about their sexual history, featuring questions like "Have you ever had oral sex? How old were you when you had sexual intercourse for the first time?"
They also ask invasive questions about the student's family, mental health, and seek to change their behavior outside of school. These surveys ask children questions about their parents' political opinions, income, and family attitudes (Courage Is A Habit, 2023). Not only is this an invasion of privacy, but many parents feel like their information is being extorted and used as a method of control. These are also carried out without parental knowledge.
According to “progressive” activists, saying that you support parental rights is a “homophobic dog whistle.” The gay parents in our movement beg to differ. Gay and lesbian parents don’t want their children exposed to sexualized content in the classroom more than any other set of parents. Assuming that all of us think the same way is woke homophobia at its finest.
The Parents' Bill of Rights specifically gives parents the ability to opt-out of this corrupt scam and the option to see the content of these surveys to decide for themselves.
Sex Harassment
Title IX originally protected girls from various forms of sexual harassment, on the basis of sex. When "gender identity" is added to the category of sex, then that also changes the meaning of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment has been changed to "sex harassment," and refers to anything that does not affirm a child's "gender identity." It mandates that teachers and staff use the child's preferred pronouns and allow them to go by a different name and persona in school than at home. Parents are left in the dark. Bills like the ones passed in North Carolina require that parents be notified “prior to any changes in the name or pronoun used for a student in school records or by school personnel." It also will discipline teachers who purposely keep secrets from parents. The guidelines asserted that students' identities were being socially transitioned at school because this would positively affect their mental health. However, recent data says otherwise. A new study that recently came out surveyed 1,655 parents of children who have recently adopted a cross-sex identity. They found that after social transition, children became much worse off, showing an increase in psychosocial distress (Diaz et. al, 2023). Their mental health deteriorated considerably. Socially transitioning a child at school might actually harm children’s mental health.
If children are told that they are trapped in the wrong body and the only way that they can be happy is if they amputate their body parts, then they are going to become anxious, insecure, and scared. Not only that, but it would be considered "sex harassment" for teachers to not play along. These "trans kids" are being celebrated every day and told that they are living their authentic selves by pretending to be something that they aren't. Instead of helping distressed children navigate their identity, their confusion is reinforced. Social transition is directly correlated with persistence in trans identity, and these children are more likely to become sterilized with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. LET KIDS BE KIDS! Everyone figures themselves out eventually. These topics are way too complex for children to understand.
Gays Against Groomers fully supports the laws that are being put in place to roll back "gender identity" policies in schools and bring the education system back to normal. None of these laws are anti-gay in the slightest, and we do not appreciate them being framed as such.
As we firmly stated in our testimony that we submitted on behalf of Chapter 117 in Maine, we made it clear that "Children are NOT a social experiment. While you usher minors down a conveyor belt to lifelong pharmaceutical dependency, we will continue to stand against you until the abuse is stopped. This has gone on long enough and we will not allow this to be done in our name. Children deserve to grow up into healthy adults and live their life in ways which make them happy. Policies like this one prevent them from ever achieving that." We contacted The Department of Education this Spring and demanded that Title IX and similar laws be legislated the way they were intended to be – on the basis of sex not gender. We even passed a bill in Missouri that does exactly that. An ideologically-charged education
system that prioritizes affirming every child's special identity makes it impossible to address necessary academic needs. Public schools are failing in their basic mission to educate young Americans; as a result, we are in the midst of a full-blown disaster of illiteracy and innumeracy. Eighth graders’ average math test scores have dropped to their lowest levels in 35 years. Their reading scores are the lowest in two decades (Matthew, 2023). The sexualized material puts them at risk of dissociating from their embodied reality. And it encourages them to adopt a potentially harmful identity, sometimes leading to sterilization. This entire system needs to be dismantled and backpedaled to where it was just a few short years ago.
We are on the right side of history. And we will continue to speak out and fight until laws like these are passed nationwide, Queer Theory is no longer referenced in classrooms, and "gender identity" is destroyed once and for all.
REFERENCES
Title IX Fact Sheet (2022)
Title IX -- Proposed Changes
Title IX Of The Education Amendments Of 1972
Senate Bill 49 -- Parents' Bill of Rights
Fairness in Women's Sports Act
North Carolina legislature overrides governor’s vetoes to enact 3 bills targeting transgender youth
Dianne Gallagher, 2023
The facade of gender identity is failing our students ELIZABETH GRACE MATTHEW, 2023
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4115665-the-facade-of-gender-identity-is-failing-our-students/
"Think of the Children” has become a dangerous dog whistle for regressive ideas (2022)
Biden's Title IX changes mean this locker room horror is coming to a school near you (Brewer, 2023)
The Impact of Title IX
(Barbara Winslow)
Courage Is A Habit
Data Mining Your Child: What You Can Do To Stop It
Courage Is A Habit
SEL Bloodline
SEL Surveys
Chapter 117 – Maine
Maine LD 1735
Louisiana HB 466
Missouri SB 39
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases
Diaz S, Bailey JM. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases. Arch Sex Behav. 2023 Apr;52(3):1031-1043. doi: 10.1007/s10508-023-02576-9. Epub 2023 Mar 29. Retraction in: Arch Sex Behav. 2023 Jun 14;: PMID: 36991212; PMCID: PMC10102036.