With Biden’s rewrite of Title IX, women’s equality is a thing of the past 

Last week, President Biden’s Department of Education released new guidelines for Title IX, the 1972 civil rights law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program — elementary, secondary or post-secondary — that receives federal money of any kind. “Sex” is now redefined as “gender identity,” thereby protecting the rights of “trans women” (i.e., males who identify as women) to enter female-only spaces and join female-only organizations. Meanwhile, accusations of sexual assault against male students or faculty members can now be adjudicated by campus bureaucrats with no regard to due process protections for the accused.  

These outrageous rewrites to Title IX are, each in their own way, an unforgivable affront against women’s equality.  

Under this law, any male claiming to be female will be permitted to enter girls’ and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, and to participate in women’s teams and organizations. A female student who objects to admitting a male to a team or organization intended for women, or who personally feels uncomfortable in a locker room with a male, will now be faced not just with social stigma but with potential legal repercussions for her school, team or organization.  

The failure of this new iteration of Title IX to take cognizance of women’s physical vulnerability is tantamount to the erasure of women under the law. It is a bastardization of the law’s original intent: to grant female students equal access to educational, athletic and professional opportunities. Moreover and more importantly, it is a rejection of biological and moral truth in favor of the faux-progressive misogyny that claims to protect women even as it eradicates our daughters’ basic rights.  

While victimizing women with one hand, this rewrite of Title IX “protects” female students unto paternalistic infantilization — and the consequent victimization of men — with the other.  

Under the new guidelines, colleges are permitted to reinstate the kangaroo courts that fail to offer male students accused of sexual assault the rights of due process. Far from actually protecting women from sexual assault — an act that would be laudable but which campus leftists would never do because it would involve acknowledging (a) that women and men exist as biological realities, not subjective identities, and (b) that most women and most men relate to sex differently — these sham “trials” of accused men utterly fail to deliver justice. By turning the adjudication of sexual assault accusations on campus over to our universities’ ideologically blinded bureaucrats, Biden’s version of Title IX both allows some percentage of rapists to avoid the prison time they deserve and subjects some percentage of innocent (and disproportionately minority) male students to academic and social penalties they do not deserve, should the case be one involving “Sunday morning regret” in which women who consented to sex but wish they hadn’t try to enact justice on behalf of their feelings. 

Meanwhile, the insistence of many on the left that we should “believe all women” — in practice, that a woman’s perceived lack of agency to say “no” to sex amounts to a man’s legal (not just moral) guilt — relies on a notion of female purity of heart and mind that assumes grown women merit the protection due little girls. That is, that we are not just physically weaker than men, but intellectually and emotionally weaker as well.  

In the United States, the primary legacy of such infantilizing paternalism toward adults whose femaleness is assumed to exempt them from moral doubt is the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century lynching of Black men falsely accused of sexual assault by consenting white women (a la “To Kill A Mockingbird”).  

It is not easy to roll back women’s rights, due process for all, and the color-blind application of justice at the same time. But Biden’s Title IX has managed. So much for progress.  

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Her writing on education, culture, politics, and religion has appeared in USA Today, Law and Liberty, Deseret News, The Dispatch, and The Bulwark.