Tag Archives: Title IX

Bigots and Title IX

14 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/13/2024

Biden administration’s update for Title IX of the national education law was scheduled for implementation on August 1st. However, a coalition of bigots and creepy right wing billionaires won court relief for about half of America’s schools. Moms for Liberty, claiming members with students in 2000 schools nationally, got a stay for those schools on July 26. With the addition of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina on July 31, the total number of states challenging the law rose to 26.

The latest stays came when the US District court in the Northern District of Alabama ruled that the Biden/Harris rewrite should take effect. That was July 30th. An immediate appeal was filed that day by Independent Women’s Forum, Parents Defending Education, Speech First, and the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina.

The three supposedly grassroots organizations that joined the legal challenge are libertarian billionaire creations … specifically Charles Koch’s.

A 2021 Washington Post report about Charles Koch fueling the opposition to mask wearing in schools, noted work of the Independent Women’s Forum:

“In 2003, Independent Women’s Forum announced that it was formally affiliating with Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s main political arm, and that the two organizations would share office space. ‘The affiliation agreement provides for staff and resource sharing between Americans for Prosperity and the Independent Women’s Forum,’ an archived news release stated, explaining that Nancy Pfotenhauer, then-president of Independent Women’s Forum, would also serve as president of Americans for Prosperity.”

Speech First and Parents Defending Education are two more Koch-created entities. Speech First founder Nicole Neily, now leading Parents Defending Education, is a long-time Koch operative.

Source Watch reported:

“Speech First’s president and only listed employee, Nicole Neily has worked for many Koch-affiliated groups. Neily was the president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, the Cato Institute’s manager of external relations, the coalition relations manager for FreedomWorks’ Center for Global Economic Growth, and a “Koch summer fellow for both the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”

Neily worked from 2009-2012 at the Independent Women’s Forum where she served eight months as executive director.

On January 2021, Neily became founder and president of Parents Defending Education.

This attack on Biden’s Title IX update is not an organic grassroots effort. It is a billionaire financed attack on public schools and equity … a bigoted aggression on homosexuality.

Charles Koch Opposes Justness

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed on the campus of University of Colorado, briefly reported on resistance to the Title IX changes, sharing:

“Preventing exclusion based on gender identity: This section is one of the more contentious elements of the changes even though it does not apply to school sports, which have been the focus of much of the controversy in recent years related to transgender students in schools.”

The new rules also made discrimination against gay students easier to demonstrate. Trump’s 2020 rewrite required a discrimination complaint be severe AND pervasive. Under Biden, NEPC observes, “[T]he incident(s) need only be severe OR pervasive, making it easier to file a successful complaint.”

It does not seem these legal appeals will lead to overturning the new rules but will delay their implementation. The language is consistent with prior case law interpretations of Title IX, including Whitaker v. Kenosha (2017) and Grimm v. Gloucester (2020).

From the 2017 case record:

“Ashton, a transgender high school senior, requested to use the boys’ restroom while at school. The Kenosha School District denied the request, indicating that Ashton’s mere presence would invade the privacy rights of his male classmates.”

The Seventh Circuit upheld this injunction, stating, “Harms identified by the District are all speculative, whereas the harms to Ashton are well‐documented.”

In 2020, the Fourth Circuit ruled, in a similar case, “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 can protect transgender students from school bathroom policies that prohibit them from affirming their gender.”

These are just outcomes which billionaire Charles Koch is fighting against!

Save the Children

Many of us are not well-informed about the plight of transgender children. However, as cited above, courts find ignoring transgender youths’ issues inhuman. A small subset of human beings is born with gender-dysphoria, a mismatch between gender identity and their own personal sense of gender. Scientific American reported almost all major American medical groups have “policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care” and “find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.”

Columbia University Psychiatry states:

“It is well documented that TGNB [transgender non-binary] adolescents and young adults experience anxiety and depression, as well as suicidal ideation, at a much higher rate than their cisgender peers. According to The Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, 54 percent of young people who identified as transgender or nonbinary reported having seriously considered suicide in the last year, and 29 percent have made an attempt to end their lives.”

Transgender children are fine just the way they are but society can be flawed. People tend to see a small group of people that are different from themselves and make negative judgments. There is no healthy way for these children to change so the rest of us need to grow and express our humane side.

A 2022 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute identified 0.6% of Americans, over 13, as transgender. Adults over 17 had a rate 0.5% while youths 13 to 17 came in at 1.4%. The numbers are quite small but not insignificant.

The new Title IX rules, fought by Charles Koch and right wing Republicans, are designed to protect these people.

Conclusion

The new rules reverse a requirement that schools only investigate alleged incidents on their campus and end a demand for in-person live courtroom-like hearings in sexual misconduct cases. Betsy DeVos called this a “radical rewrite” of the law, claiming it is an “endeavor born entirely of progressive politics, not sound policy.”

Kel O’Hara, a senior attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, has a much different view:

“The new regulations put an end to unfair and traumatic grievance procedures that favor harassers. No longer will student survivors be subjected to processes that prioritize the interests of their perpetrators over their own well being and safety.”

I don’t expect anything from Mom’s for Liberty, a feckless organization that only exists because of billionaire dollars. However, seeing 26 states in this country side with homophobia and discrimination is disheartening. Since their claims against Biden’s rules are baseless, the only conclusion is that many leaders in these Republican-dominated states are hoping to delay equity until head bigot, Donald Trump, is elected President of the United States.

Members of the LGBTQ+ community are among the most creative and productive citizens in America.

Aren’t bigots who encourage hate campaigns against them, benighted fools? 

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Sex Discrimination Education Law

2 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/2/2024

Joe Biden promised, when running for president, to undo the damage to Title IX implemented during the Trump and DeVos era. The 1972 amendment to the US education law enacted rules against sexual discrimination at all schools receiving federal dollars. This was a fix to the 1964 civil rights law which lacked protection in schools based on a students’ sex. During the three year process of developing new guidelines, the Education Department received over 300,000 comments. The rules were announced in April and will go into effect in August.

Under Trump’s rules, there was no protection for LGBTQ+ students. That will change.

Biden’s changes will replace a narrow definition of sex-based harassment with a wider range of conduct. They reverse a requirement that schools only investigate alleged incidents on their campus. Also ended are demands for in-person live hearings in courtroom-like settings where the person accused of sexual misconduct, or their lawyer, can question the accuser.

Betsy DeVos called Biden’s new rules a “radical rewrite” of the law. She claimed it was an “endeavor born entirely of progressive politics, not sound policy.” Kel O’Hara, a senior attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, had a much different take:

“The new regulations put an end to unfair and traumatic grievance procedures that favor harassers. No longer will student survivors be subjected to processes that prioritize the interests of their perpetrators over their own well being and safety.”

Genesis of Title IX 

Bernice Sandler, known as “The Godmother of Title IX”, earned a master’s degree in Clinical and School Psychology and in 1952 married Jerrold Sandler. The couple had two children. Bernice returned to school at the University of Maryland where she earned a Doctor of Education in Counseling and Personnel Services.

Sandler began teaching at Maryland part-time but her application for a full-time position was continually denied. When inquiring why, Bernice was told she “comes on too strong for a woman” and that she was “just a housewife who went back to school.”

This led Bernice to joining the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). While researching the strategies of African American civil rights activists, she discovered that in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson further amended the civil rights restrictions on companies receiving federal dollars from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion and national origin, by adding gender.

Bernice realized that most universities had federal contracts and were illegally not hiring women. Between 1969 and 1971, she and WEAL filed sex discrimination charges against 250 schools, including the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University and the entire state university and college systems of California, New Jersey and Florida.

In 1970, she filed a class-action lawsuit against all universities in America.

In the same year, Edith Green was an education policy expert and Democratic Congresswoman from Oregon. The sudden flurry of enforcement requests piqued her interest and caused Green to begin hearings on sex discrimination at federally funded universities.

Persuaded by testimonies put forth during the hearings, Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii joined Green in drafting legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in education.

In the Senate, Indiana Democrat, Birch Bayh, led the legislation. Bayh’s wife, the former Marvella Hern, was an outstanding student from Oklahoma. Marvella was drawn to the work of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia. She wanted to go to that college but her application was returned with a note saying, “Women need not apply.”

Bayh was a co-recipient of the NCAA Gerald R. Ford Award at the 2006 convention. In an interview he shared with NCAA News about Title IX:

“We spent 26½ years together with Marvella teaching me about what it was really like being a woman in a man’s world. Without her, I know I wouldn’t understand the importance of this legislation.”

When the legislation was formed, Senator Bayh wrote the 37 words that became Title IX:

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

On Title IX’s 50th anniversary in 2022, The Harvard Gazette interviewed Jeannie Suk Gersen, Professor of Law, and Susan Ware PhD historian.

Gersen noted the motivation for the law, “Women faced blatant educational inequality, such as exclusion from certain colleges and universities or from certain programs and spaces within those schools, higher admissions standards than men, more frequent tenure denials than men, and myriad other imposed disadvantages relative to men.”

Ware shared her opinion on why the law made such dramatic and rapid change:

“Once you point out that the men’s crew team has its own boathouse and the women have to change in their van and they don’t have showers, anybody can see that’s not fair, and it’s not equal. So just making a list of things that need to be addressed and having Title IX to back you up was a very effective way to get change.“

Those changes came quickly. By the early 1980s, women were receiving about 40% of the resources compared to men for collegiate sports programs. Title IX is often presented as a zero-sum game; “if women win, men lose.”

Ware shared one of her favorite quotes, “There’s men, there’s women, and there’s football.”

A Bipartisan Effort

June 23 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law. One of the biggest supporters of the legislation was Alaskan Republican Senator, Ted Stevens. He believed young women should have equal opportunity to their male counterparts for participating in school athletics. His support gained him a reputation as “protector of Title IX.”

On March 1 1972, the Senate version of Title IX overwhelmingly passed (88-6). Ten days later, the House version passed (275-125). After the bill went through conference committee, the Senate agreed (63-15) and the House voted (218-180) to pass it into law.

This bill not only upended intercollegiate sports but also touched many other corners of the campus. It forced shifts in hiring, promotion, admissions, reckoning on sexual harassment and assault.

There has also been a dramatic change in college graduation rates. Pew research showed that in 1970, 8% of women and 14% of men graduated. In 2021, those college graduation numbers became 39% for women and 37% for men.  

Title IX opened a path of justice and equality in America.

Biden’s new rules have made the law more robust and fair.

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