A half-century after the passage of Title IX, the Biden regime is planning to attempt a rewrite of the sex discrimination statute around ‘gender identity’ while also removing due process protections regarding sexual misconduct proceedings on college campuses put in place by the Trump administration.
And there are a number of female collegiate athletes planning to oppose the administration’s efforts.
The athletes detailed to “Just the News” their grassroots effort as well as the risk of being canceled each of them say they are facing. That said, they note that some current lawmakers have outlined legislative strategies while an attorney general pledged to litigate against the administration if other methods to derail the Biden effort don’t work.
Just the News adds:
The dominance of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division 1 national championship, has spurred much of the activism.
Women for Fairness in Sports (WomenFINS) President Marshi Smith said its March letter to the NCAA Board of Governors on behalf of University of Arizona swimming alumni is now up to 44 signatures.
Smith said she had been “on the phone probably for a month straight, day and night,” organizing support for WomenFINs, which is hosting its own 50th anniversary Title IX event June 26 in Las Vegas.
Smith, a national champ and a 2006 graduate, told the outlet she had been “living with a sense of denial throughout the season” before seeing Thomas step up to the women’s podium at the national championship.
“There’s been so much wreckage on the path to this victory by Lia Thomas,” thwarting the “lifelong ambition and dream” for thousands of women who were competing for around 30 slots at this “very elite level swim championship,” Smith explained.
Young Women for America ambassadors Chloe Satterfield and Macy Petty also helped organize a “Save Women’s Sports” rally outside the Georgia Tech event where Thomas made collegiate history.
Satterfield remarked that people live in fear that they will “destroy their futures if they speak out about” the unfairness in having biological men compete in women’s sports. But she explained that some family members of female swimmers in the competition came out of the meet “in tears” to thank them for speaking out because “it feels like there’s nobody fighting for us.”
Adding to the frustration, the female swimmers “knew they lost before they even walked in … despite probably 10, 15 years of hard work for this very day,” Petty noted, adding that Thomas went from 462nd in men’s swimming to first in women’s competition:
Satterfield, a four-year high school tennis player, lost to a transgender girl in a match a few years ago. It quickly became clear the “thousands of dollars” her family spent on her training were no match for the opponent’s biology-based speed and agility, Satterfield said. “They know what they’re doing isn’t right.”
college volleyball player, Petty said she is “very scared of the NCAA and the power that they have over me because of my scholarship.”
As for the Biden administration’s efforts to sack Title IX, the Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Parshall Perry noted that she worked on interpretive guidance for the statute following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling on gender identity and the due process policy in Trump’s Department of Education.
She said that the regime’s attempt to reverse both of those rules is “a craven political attempt to garner capital” ahead of what she believes will be a political “bloodbath” for Democrats during the November midterms.
Perry added that neither rule drew “any criticism whatsoever that there were particular problems” after they were implemented, a reality that she noted during in Office of Management and Budget (OMB) meetings.
Biden’s Education Department, however, has not even tried to justify “such a significant overhaul on two different aspects of Title IX,” which “actually complicates the waters on something that’s been working very, very well for 50 years.”
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, “who led a coalition of 15 AGs opposing Biden’s campus sexual misconduct review, said the Biden regime wants to gut the first-of-its-kind rulemaking and return to the Obama administration protocol devised by then-Vice President Biden,” Just the News reported.
He also pledged that he will go to federal court to stop the administration from making the changes it seeks.
Biden has “singlehandedly been the best proponent for school choice in this country that we’ve had in probably 30 years,” he said.
