President Biden is ordering schools to allow transgender athletes to play in women’s sports in an executive order targeted at “preventing and combating discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.”
“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” says the order.
“Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes,” continued the order.
The order clearly shows that the Justice Department plans on aggressively enforcing Title IX, which means schools that object to the order may risk losing federal funding.
The Biden Administration also makes the claim that discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation manifests into racism.
“Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation manifests differently for different individuals, and it often overlaps with other forms of prohibited discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of race or disability,” claims the order.
The order cites the recent Supreme court case Bostock v. Clayton County which stated that discrimination based on “gender identity and sexual orientation” falls under protections created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Last year, 17 states introduced legislation restricting athlete’s sports participation to their biological gender. Idaho was the only state to pass this law, but its implementation was blocked by the ACLU.
The Trump administration intervened in Connecticut when Trump’s Department of Education stated that a law allowing transgender women to participate in women’s sports violated the Title IX rights of biological women. The administration also supported a lawsuit against Connecticut filed by several biological women.
Erin Buzuvis, a professor specializing in “gender and discrimination in education and athletics” at Western New England School of Law, stated that the Connecticut case could “evaporate” if the administration does not want to push the issue.
“The Idaho situation is different because it is a state law that is being challenged under the equal protection doctrine,” said Buzuvis in a statement to the Associated Press. “That could set some sort of national standard about what kind of policies states are allowed to have or prohibited to have. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the case would say, ‘Here is the one policy that all states must have.”
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