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The Revenge of the Title IX Dads
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The Revenge of the Title IX Dads

Gender identity politics flipped Title IX on its head.

The "Take Back Title IX" tour bus in 2024. (Photo by Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

How did Title IX, the law historically associated with providing women and girls more opportunity to participate in sports, become the cudgel the Biden-Harris administration used to allow biological boys to compete on girls sports teams? The story of how this happened goes a long way to explaining how Donald Trump won a second term as president of the United States this month.

Title IX was passed in 1972 in the spirit of the second-wave feminism that was popular at the time. The idea was to give women equal opportunities in education, particularly in college. Sports wasn’t even mentioned in the law. It was later in the ‘70s that the bureaucrats in Washington got the job of figuring out how to enforce Title IX in sports.

These federal bureaucrats had a conundrum on their hands. Title IX outlaws discrimination on the basis of sex, but enforcing nondiscrimination in sports would do the opposite of what the law intended: Girls and women would lose opportunities, not gain them. If the principle of non-sex discrimination applied in sports—like in does in math and English class, for example—there could be no separate teams for women and men just as there are no separate math and English classes for men and women. If girls and women weren’t guaranteed sports opportunities, there would only be men—especially in high school and college—on most sports teams. The typical boy would out-run, out-lift, and out-throw the typical girl.

But the conundrum remained. How do you enforce a non-sex discrimination law when you separate the sexes? Providing each sex equal opportunities to participate in sports is the obvious answer.

But in the 1990s, the bureaucrats at the Department of Education came up with a different answer.  Without any act of Congress, they changed the law that had been passed to guarantee equal opportunity into a law that guaranteed equal outcomes. In a 1996 “Dear colleague” letter, the department made the test for Title IX compliance something called “substantial proportionality.”  This meant that the percentage of a school’s male and female athletes must mirror the percentage of males and females in the student body. If a school is 60 percent female, 60 percent of its athletes must be female.

Many women are dedicated and enthusiastic athletes, but, compared with boys, girls have a less unidirectional interest in sports. Census data shows that girls and women have more varied extracurricular interests than boys. Boys are more willing to sit on the bench on the football team, while more girls are content in joining the debate club or theater troupe. Plus, in colleges and universities, women are the majority of “nontraditional” students–students who are older, have families, or have full-time jobs. These women have neither the time nor the inclination to join the crew team.

The result of this policy was the loss of thousands of teams and scholarships for men as schools sought to make the numbers of male and female athletes “equal.” Schools that couldn’t match their rate of female participation in sports with their rate of male participation had to cut men’s opportunities. It was a quota—a numbers game that the law specifically forbade. Even worse, it didn’t help women, it just hurt men. Nonrevenue sports like wrestling, men’s swimming, and men’s gymnastics were decimated. When colleges and universities had to cut costs following the COVID pandemic, 16 men’s NCAA Division I programs were cut, compared to just four for women. But this injustice is seemingly the price the country is willing to pay for women’s opportunities. 

Under the Biden administration, Title IX was changed once again. As the number of trans-identifying people in high schools and colleges grew, they began to seek spots on the teams that matched their gender “identity.” Brave female athletes like Martina Navratilova immediately understood the threat that biological males were to women’s sports and spoke out against it. But in the federal bureaucracy, the most radical voices prevailed. In April, the Biden Department of Education issued new regulations—not new law passed by Congress but new rules created by unelected federal employees—that included prohibitions on discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

But a funny thing happened while the bureaucrats in Washington were twisting and transforming Title IX. As girls’ and women’s sports got more popular, dads started to become as invested in their girls on the playing field as they had traditionally been invested in their boys. They started attending games; becoming boosters; living vicariously through their daughters’ athletic accomplishments the way they once did with their sons’. 

Then these dads saw Lia Thomas—a transgender woman who competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team—standing on the winner’s platform of the national women’s 500-yard freestyle championships in March 2022. Thomas’ towering, broad-shouldered presence in the first place position stood in stark contrast to the biological females in second and third place.

These Title IX dads didn’t like what they saw. But when they objected, they were called transphobes. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democrat of Massachusetts, is just such a dad. He expressed concern that his two young daughters might one day “[get] run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” Moulton got hammered by Democrats for his apostasy. Moulton was called on to resign, a “Neighbors Against Hate” rally was organized outside his office, and his governor, Massachusetts Democrat Maura Healy, accused him of “playing politics” and “picking on particularly vulnerable children.”

But the truth is the Biden administration has perverted the law that protects Moulton’s daughters. And they did it without the consent of the very people it most affected.

The Trump campaign and other Republicans went out of their way to highlight the fact that biological male athletes are now being allowed on the playing field and in the locker rooms with America’s daughters. In the last days of the campaign, the Trump team ran an ad highlighting the “wrong turn” America had taken by, among other things, “allowing men to beat up women and win medals.” That, and their infamous ad tagline, “Kamala is for them/them. President Trump is for you” was aimed straight at Title IX dads.

The Biden-Harris campaign dismissed the attack as bigoted and the issue as inconsequential. But it was neither. Progressives turned a law made to protect girls into a law that threatens girls. Their dads noticed.

Jessica Gavora is the author of "Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX."

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