Biden’s Title IX regulations allowed LGBTQ+ students to fight discrimination without mounting a lawsuit; instead, they could just file a complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which is less stressful and time-consuming. After last week’s ruling, that’s no longer the case. But, Ibrahim said, advocates and legal experts were not depending on these regulations.
“We were suing for decades on the basis of the statute only,” she said. This federal judge in Kentucky deleted the Biden administration’s efforts to be explicit about how transgender students are protected at schools, but he did not touch their inclusion in gender equity laws. “That’s only the purview of Congress,” she said.
This bill in Congress would have that effect. Through this legislation, Congress is trying to define what gender discrimination is based on traditional gender norms, said Seth Chandler, a constitutional law professor at the University of Houston Law Center. This legislation doesn’t leave much ambiguity, and the only way to overturn it would be to make a constitutional challenge — which he sees as a difficult undertaking.
The ban also calls for the Government Accountability Office to conduct a study on any adverse psychological or developmental effects felt by cisgender girls playing sports with transgender girls.
Research has found that trans women who undergo testosterone suppression through gender-affirming care have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sports. Trans athletes have also pointed out that athletic ability among trans people varies just as it does for cisgender people. The NCAA, the largest college sports governing body in the country, calls for each sport’s national governing body to set rules for transgender student-athletes.
Rep. Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, called the bill on Tuesday “a federal takeover of sports on all levels.” Trahan, who played Division 1 sports in college and is the mother of two girls, said on the House floor that Republicans’ approach to this issue will have devastating consequences. She invoked what enforcement of such a law could look like.
“Girls as young as four years old, being subjected to invasive lines of questioning about their bodies, and even physical inspections by an adult stranger, a predator, all because some creep accuses them of not being a girl?” she said.
House Republicans skirted questions from Democrats about how the bill would be enforced. Rep. Mark Takano, Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, and other Democrats portrayed the bill as the “Child Predator Empowerment Act,” saying that it would accelerate a national crisis of sexual assault on women and young girls — and that it would put a target on the back of every young woman who plays school sports.
On the House floor before Tuesday’s vote, Steube railed against the concept of transgender identity as a whole, saying that terms such as “nonbinary,” “trans man,” and “trans women” were made up. However, transgender people and gender diverse people have existed throughout history and in different cultures.
