Oklahoma’s education leader advises districts to reject Biden’s Title IX changes

EXCLUSIVE — Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is directing all local school districts in his state not to comply with the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX because it puts “women in danger.”

In a letter Wednesday to all local superintendents in the state obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner, Walters called on districts not to make policy changes based on the controversial Title IX overhaul, which redefines sex to include claimed gender identities, calling the rewrite “illegal” and outside compliance with Oklahoma law.

“In Oklahoma, we don’t bend to the senseless will of Biden and his posse eradicating women’s rights and putting women in danger,” Walters told the Washington Examiner. “This is why I’ve instructed every superintendent in my state to completely ignore Biden’s new Title IX changes that allow males to roam in female locker rooms, dorms, and bathrooms — places where women should feel safe.”

Walters urged other states to follow Oklahoma’s lead in fighting the Title IX changes, saying, “It’s time for every state leader to stand up and say enough of this preposterous charade that erases women and puts their safety in jeopardy.”

On Friday, the Biden administration finalized rules governing Title IX, stripping many Trump-era protections from the statute and injecting gender theory into school policies by, for example, allowing boys in girls’ restrooms as young as elementary school.

Walters warned the superintendents that the new rule could abolish single-sex extracurricular activities, gender-specific locker rooms and restrooms, and other spaces traditionally maintained for safety and privacy reasons. He also warned that the new rules could make rejecting the use of “preferred pronouns” for transgender-identifying children a Title IX violation.

“I expect there will be litigation filed soon challenging the validity of these rules,” Walters’s letter stated, noting state legislators are considering legislation in Oklahoma to define “man” and “woman” by biological sex. “Although these rule changes are set to go into effect August 1, I hope and expect there to be a preliminary injunction and possibly a permanent injunction that would delay the implementation of these rules while the rule is decided in federal court, which could be an indefinite amount of time.”

Walters offered legal and policy support to the school districts to avoid compliance with the new Title IX.

On Tuesday, Walters sent another letter, obtained by the Washington Examiner, to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, slamming his agency’s rules as “the most devastating attack on women’s rights in our country’s history” and calling on him to resign if he will not change course.

“Title IX was designed to ensure women had the guarantee of sex equality in education and an environment free from discrimination,” the letter stated. “But with one pen stroke, you have set women’s rights back decades while weaponizing Title IX into a means to enforce the Administration’s radical ideological viewpoint.”

He called on Cardona to reverse the rule changes, saying he had a choice between going “to sleep at night knowing that you’ve made it more difficult for women to succeed in America” and “doing the right thing.”

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“While the country will never forget how you sacrificed women’s rights in a sad attempt to appeal to the most radical wing of your party, you can still avoid the permanent damage these rules will inflict on women,” Walters added.

The Department of Education did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.