On June 2nd, the Department of Education (DoE) designated June as Title IX month, noting that they wished to recognize Title IX’s “53 years of protecting women’s rights.” Title IX protects women by allowing for equal educational opportunity for girls and young women as well as promoting their safety in locker rooms, sports, private rooms, and much more. Title IX is rooted in biological sex. It recognizes adult human females as women and young human females as girls.
In conjunction with this initiative, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, sent a letter to over 1600+ California schools warning of potential violations of the Equal Protections Clause if they comply with Bylaw 300.d of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), a CIF rule change that allows biological males to participate in female sports. The Justice Department’s letter states that Bylaw 300.D would “deprive girls of athletic opportunities and benefits based solely on their biological sex, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment. This is self-evident because of the inherent and undeniable biological differences between men and women, which place women at a disadvantage when competing with men in sports.
In addition, DoE’s Office for Civil Rights announced that it is conducting federal investigations of the University of Wyoming and Jefferson County Public Schools in CO. DoE’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating the University of Wyoming because the “university allowed a man to join a campus sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG).” As a result, the sorority was told that this male student was able to access living areas in the sorority house, which violates Title IX’s protection of the rights of women to have private and safe living spaces without intrusion from biological men. The Department of Education warned that because the school receives federal funding “that supports, sponsors, or promotes a sorority or fraternity, [they] must meet its obligations under Title IX to protect its students from sex-based harassment and sexual assault…”
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is also investigating Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Colorado because of their policy that permits boys or girls, based on their “gender identity,” to request overnight accommodations with students of the opposite sex, which removes “the safeguard of single-sex overnight accommodations.” In JCPS, “the parents of an 11-year-old girl in the district discovered their daughter would have had to share a bed with a male student on an overnight school trip without being notified by the school.”
Person and Identity Project will continue to monitor the progress of these cases and include updates in future newsletters.
