President Joe Biden and his administration are getting hammered over changes being sought to Title IX, a federal statute that prohibits discrimination based on sex, so that it includes protections for transgender youth.
In an interview with the Daily Wire, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) called the change “an attack … on all women.”
The change would offer protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity, which, critics say, will allow biological males to utilize school facilities intended for females only.
Tuberville, who began his professional coaching career as a high school girls’ basketball coach, said that Biden’s proposed changes would result in “lawsuit after lawsuit, and unfortunately, it’s going to really affect high school and college women.”
In fact, as the Daily Wire noted, lawsuits have already been filed regarding the issue, including three female athletes in Connecticut who sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) in February 2020 for allowing two biological males who identified as females to compete against biological females in track and field events for high school. Later on, a fourth student joined the suit but it was dismissed in April 2021 after the transgender students graduated.
The two biological males dominated girls’ track and field events throughout their high school careers, taking home 15 women’s state championship titles that were previously held by nine biological females in Connecticut.
“We train for so many days a week, so many hours to be able to be the best in our state and the best in our region, and these biological males are just taking it away from us and we really deserve it,” Alanna Smith, one of the girls who brought the lawsuit, told Fox News in a February 2021 interview.
In May, Tuberville sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in which the Alabama Republican argued that the proposed changes to Title IX would destroy “opportunities for generations of women and girls at the behest of liberal extremism.”
“Any such weakening of current Title IX protections would amount to a reversal of 50 years of progress for women and girls in sports and an offense to every woman who has ever benefited from the enactment of the law,” Tuberville wrote. “Title IX has fostered generations of female athletes who would otherwise never have been afforded the same opportunities as their male counterparts.”
He also noted that at the time, at least 13 states had enacted laws prohibiting biological males from competing in all-female events. He also co-sponsored the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, legislation that would require Title IX to define “sex” based “solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.”
“They’re not about to even let this come to the floor,” Tuberville told The Daily Wire, noting that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) won’t allow the measure to come up for a vote.
He also said that Republicans support the bill, as does Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, indicating that it would likely pass if it were brought up.
