KIMBERLY HERMANN | July 03, 2024
The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.
Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”
In 1972, Congress—recognizing certain inadequacies in the law for women that didn’t fully live up to that Jeffersonian vision free from harassment and discrimination—passed Title IX of the Education Amendments.
For 52 years, Title IX has protected women’s pursuit of their dreams, expanding their athletic, academic, and economic opportunities.
Now the Biden administration and its Education Department, in thrall to radical gender ideology, would erase that progress.
In deciding to reinterpret the statute by replacing “sex” with “gender identity,” the Biden administration would transform a statute meant to protect women into one that would punish them. From kindergarten to college, girls would be unable to raise their voices to protect the very rights Title IX affirmed for them for more than five decades.
The ramifications are deeply unsettling.
Last year in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, parents sounded the alarm when a fully intact male coach, who goes by the name Sasha Yates and identifies as a woman, regularly changed in the girls’ locker room, exposing his male genitalia in front of 15- and 16-year-old girls. In West Virginia, a group of girls was banned from a track meet after refusing to compete against a male in a shot-put competition.
