Locker Room Wars

Title IX was written to protect women's sports. Now it's being used to destroy them.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed a series of amendments to laws passed in the 1960s to prohibit various forms of discrimination in any institution that accepted public money. The most famous of these amendments is known as Title IX, and it specifically prohibits discrimination by sex. While not specifically aimed at college athletics, that is where Title IX has had the most impact in the half century since its passage.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, some conservative pundits expressed concerns that enforcing Title IX’s mandate for equality in collegiate athletics was causing schools to close down men’s programs. Those concerns seem quaint now that the Biden/Harris administration has issued a massive rewrite of Title IX that intends to force schools and universities to erase any distinctions between men and women in the name of transgenderism.

The transgender issue was already simmering during the 2010s. The Obama administration issued a memo interpreting Title IX to mean that schools and universities must accept a student’s proclaimed gender identity, meaning that boys who identify as girls must be allowed to participate in girls’ sports and change in girls’ locker rooms.

Idaho was the first state to strike back against this absurdity, passing House Bill 500 in 2020. The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act was a labor of love for Rep. Barbara Ehardt, who played Division 1 college basketball and then coached for fifteen years. Every Democrat opposed the bill, joined by several Republicans including current state senator Jim Guthrie and nominee Jim Woodward.

National LGBTQ+ groups brought pressure on Gov. Brad Little to veto the bill, but he signed it nonetheless. It was quickly challenged in court, and is currently on its way to the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Attorney General Raúl Labrador joined several multistate lawsuits against the new Title IX rules, winning a victory a few weeks ago when the Supreme Court let stand an injunction against the rewrite. Today, Gov. Little issued an executive order to further protect women’s sports:

I, Brad Little, Governor of the State of Idaho, pursuant to the Constitution and laws of Idaho, hereby order the Idaho State Board of Education to:

1. Work with the Idaho State Department of Education to ensure public schools are properly following all of Idaho’s laws related to fairness in women’s sports and continue to update all public schools as the legal challenges to the new Title IX rules unfold; and

2. Work to guarantee every female student in Idaho be provided equal opportunity in sports and school to the fullest extent as guaranteed to them under the original Title IX rules and Idaho law.

The governor made a statement on the Capitol steps this morning, joined by Rep. Ehardt and Riley Gaines, former college swimmer turned activist:

Earlier this month I wrote about the specter the supposedly enlightened left celebrating men punching women in the face:

Belief in transgenderism, the idea that male and female are fluid categories that can be altered at will with drugs and surgeries, is a high status belief. Believing what nearly all mankind believed until about ten years ago — that boys are boys, girls are girls, and there’s no in-between — marks you as an ignorant, superstitious, low-class rube.

A corollary to this belief is the idea that men and women are entirely interchangeable. Men on average don’t have greater upper body strength than women, nor do they have greater body mass. That’s a dangerous right wing conspiracy theory, obviously.

The nature of beliefs that are high status yet irrational is that there is tremendous social pressure to accept the party line. If all the elites agree that Bruce Jenner is now and always has been a woman, then saying otherwise could get you ostracized from polite society, so you’d better not risk it.

I am pleased to see the Idaho Republicans unite on this issue. Once we as a society can no longer distinguish between such a basic binary as male and female, then the very concept of reality will have lost all meaning. How can we live together with people who deny reality?