DeVos criticizes Biden’s Title IX changes as potentially harming women

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos slammed the Biden administration’s Title IX overhaul, saying the statute created to protect women would now be used to “harm” them.

The Biden administration finalized the rules on Friday related to sex discrimination and sexual harassment under Title IX, redefining sex to include claimed gender identities. The rules did not address transgender participation in sports, which is part of separate rulemaking likely to be finalized near the end of the year.

“I never thought I’d see the day where Title IX would be used to harm women, but sadly, that day has come,” DeVos, who ushered through the Education Department’s 2020 rulemaking on Title IX, said in a statement. “The Biden Administration’s radical rewrite of Title IX guts the half century of protections and opportunities for women and callously replaces them with radical gender theory, as Biden’s far-left political base demanded.”

DeVos explained that the new rules require that boys be allowed in girls’ bathrooms as early as elementary school, and she said that even these rules would likely have an effect on women’s sports, aside from the forthcoming rules specific to that topic.

The Biden administration was roundly slammed by other organizations as well.

Bob Eitel, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute and former senior counsel to DeVos during the Trump administration, said, “President Biden’s new Title IX rule is a textbook example of how extremists in the administration have hijacked the law to force radical changes in American society through its schools, colleges, and universities.”

“Gender ideology reigns supreme in Biden’s new rule that redefines ‘sex’ under Title IX to include an undefined ‘gender identity’ despite the law’s exquisitely clear text, purpose, and legislative history that sex is biological and binary,” he added.

Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, added, “Extending Title IX to cover gender identity means that schools will no longer have discretion over whether — or how — to provide certain services and activities to students on the basis of self-declared gender identity.”

“Title IX was written in 1972 when ‘sex’ meant male and female, and no amount of interpretive jiujitsu permits a cabinet agency to rewrite the plain language of the law,” she concluded.

One major concern is the changes to due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses that the Education Department, under DeVos, worked to ensure during the 2020 rulemaking process.

The Biden administration said it kept several of those due process provisions, but Eitel said the White House “sugarcoats” the “gutting” of those protections. “It is a sure bet that the campus ‘kangaroo courts’ and ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach to Title IX discipline that plagued schools for so long will now return to campuses,” he said.

Will Creeley, legal director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also criticized the impact of new standards for investigating campus misconduct, saying, “Colleges should use the time-tested tools that make finding the truth more likely. But the new regulations no longer require them to do so. Rather than playing political ping-pong with student rights, the Department of Education should recognize that removing procedural protections for students is the exact opposite of fairness.”

The new rule has free speech implications as well.

According to Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow and former Department of Education senior counsel Sarah Parshall Perry, the new rule “erases … free speech protections for students and teachers who don’t want to use ‘preferred pronouns,’ and parents’ right to know if their child is in the process of a gender identity ‘social transition’ at school.”

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In addition, Eitel maintains that the rules will “exacerbate the free speech crisis on campus” in part by holding a possible bludgeon over the head of someone who does not conform to the gender ideology enforced by the new rule.

“Strong-armed by the federal government, school bureaucrats will now leverage the rule’s wildly expansive definition of sex-based harassment to penalize students, faculty, and staff who voice uncomfortable or unpopular opinions and ideas,” Eitel said. “This illegal regulatory regime cannot stand.”