River News: Our View

As we report in today’s edition, this week the Biden-Harris administration’s rewrite of Title IX took effect in most of the country’s schools, endangering the rights of women across the country.

It’s a little complicated in Wisconsin. Our state is not one of 21 states who challenged the rule change and won a reprieve in federal court, though one of those lawsuits enjoined enforcement against school districts in other states that have students whose parents are members of plaintiff organizations such as Moms for Liberty. So some Wisconsin schools are affected.

That murkiness aside, many school districts in the state have gleefully signed onto the rules anyway, mounting an assault on constitutional guarantees of privacy and free speech, not to mention the civil rights of women.

Simply put, the new Title IX rule redefines “sex” as “gender identity.” What that means is that a civil rights law that was enacted during the heady and galvanizing days of America’s feminist movement has been subverted to actually squash women’s rights.

The rule turns the law on its head. It seems the goal is to erase women altogether.

As a federal judge pointed out this week in enjoining the federal government from enforcing the rule in six states, when Title IX was enacted in 1972, one of its main purposes was to root out discrimination against women in education: “Congress was concerned about the unequal treatment between men and women for admissions opportunities, scholarships, and sports.”

And the statute was talking about biological women, not some dudes who declare themselves to be women on a whim so they can compete athletically against women who are biologically weaker and slower.

Judge Rodney Sippel wrote that the legislative history, which included statistics on the number of women and men being included in various programs and activities, shows that Congress was concerned about the unequal treatment between biological men and biological women.

It’s not just an unfair advantage in sports, either, As critics point out, when you substitute the word “gender” for “sex,” it literally opens the door for biological males to use females’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and other women’s facilities.

This war on women, reinforced with government legal weapons such as the new Title IX, is a real thing. Funny, you never see a controversy arising by having transgender men competing against biological men. That’s because they don’t, or rarely do, because biological men are in fact stronger and faster.

It’s only the other way around, when transgender women — biological men — decide to cleverly disguise their reality by dressing up in the political robes of the cultural avant-garde to take advantage of real women.

It’s classic ruling class behavior —decorating the moral decline that often accompanies idle elitism with the language of liberation and artistic expression and then weaponizing it to reinforce very traditional power structures, in this case a “progressive” patriarchy.

The so-called progressivism is supposed to make it all good and OK.

But it is not good. It is not OK. It is a threat to the constitutional rights to privacy and free speech. And it is a pervasive threat, not just scattered and isolated instances. In Wisconsin alone, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty has been involved in at least three incidents in which it has had to intervene.

In Sun Prairie, WILL filed a complaint and an investigation was started after an 18-year old male who identified as transgender showered completely undressed next to four freshman girls. In Elkhorn, WILL filed a conditional motion to intervene in a lawsuit against the Elkhorn School District for its policy of designating separate bathrooms based on biological gender. 

WILL also intervened in a controversy in the Kiel School District, after three middle school boys were accused of sexual harassment for using “incorrect pronouns” when referring to a classmate. 

WILL challenged the district on First Amendment grounds and the school district closed its Title IX investigation against the boys.

These battles will only escalate. Today the controversies rage in sports — transgender women depriving biological women of a level playing field and of their rightful awards for accomplishment — but they are burrowing their way through every aspect of American life, in educational opportunities and in workplace advancement.

The goal, it seems, is to erase women altogether from any prominent or equal role in American society. Today women are being discriminated against by being forced to compete against biological males — soon pervasively under the legal guise of the very rule that was created to help women overcome discrimination — but soon expect separate women’s categories to be eliminated completely.

Women will be sent to the back of the bus in all categories of life. 

As Jonathan Butcher and Lindsay Burke of the Heritage Foundation write: “Americans do not like watching videos on social media of middle-school girls getting thrown down by a boy in a basketball game or of a high school girl having her teeth knocked out while playing field hockey. Nor do any parents want their daughters to share a locker room with a boy.”

The original Title IX was enacted using common sense — that women and men are biologically different. Those feminists who pushed bravely for Title IX not only understood but loudly protested that the lack of sex-based categories in sports — and funding for those categories — meant women would never be able to compete and succeed.

As the former gymnast national champion Jennifer Sey has pointed out, Title IX made a huge different in the lives of millions of girls and women.

“As of 1972 there were about 300,000 women and girls playing college and high school sports in the U.S.,” she wrote in a recent op-ed. “Female athletes received only 2 percent of college athletic budgets, and college athletic scholarships for women didn’t exist.”

And since then?

Sey observed out that participation of female athletes in high school has increased by 1,057 percent since 1972, and, at the college level, female athlete participation by more than 600 percent. Before Title IX, one in 27 girls in the U.S. played sports; by 2016, it was one in five.

But now the new progressive patriarchy touts its avant-garde creds by allowing men to be men but also to be women. In the new elitist culture, men are finally free to be anything they want to be. They can be women and compete in women’s sports. They can enter and use women’s showers and bathrooms. They can join women’s only clubs. They can and do win awards as Women of the Year. They are featured on magazine covers as the heroes of the modern women’s rights movement.

(Curiously, it should be noted, biological men are victims, too, for in the transgender woke age biological men, especially white ones, are racist by birth and as despised as biological women. They, too, are targets of discrimination. That is, until they proudly declare themselves to be transgender women.)

All this should tell us all we need to know: When men masquerading as women are proclaimed the new icons of feminism, biological women have been successfully repressed and chained. What follows chains is often enough erasure. 

We hold no ill will toward transgender adult individuals and bid them no inequality. They have a right to identify as they choose and to be guaranteed equal rights under the law. But the guarantee of equality of opportunity is and can never be defined as denying others their rights. 

By definition, that is is the opposite of equality of opportunity. It is privilege attained by political and cultural oppression, and it is the moral equivalency of creating a slave-owning class.

The rewrite of Title IX is bald-faced sexism. It needs to be called out as such.