When he failed to enact his agenda through Congress, President Obama famously reacted by saying he still had his phone and his pen. Unfortunately, his bureaucrats in federal agencies also had their own phones and a lot of pens. One prominent federal civil rights statute — Title IX — was repeatedly targeted for interpretation and reinterpretation within the Obama administration.
Title IX is the 1972 statute that protects girls’ and women’s athletics, and prevents schools from tolerating sexual harassment or other sex discrimination. But in 2015, one bureaucrat in the Department of Education (DOE) announced sweeping new Title IX policy in a letter to a transgender rights activist, saying that schools throughout the country also had to treat a person’s so-called gender identity as conclusive for the purpose of assigning students to “restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes.”
When President Trump won office in 2016, he swiftly set about to change the Department of Education’s inappropriate habit of “regulating by letter.” And in 2020, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos succeeded in actually enshrining Title IX changes into law — by announcing regulations that balanced the need to eliminate sexual harassment with the need to protect due process.
But in 2021, the Biden administration announced it would try to scrap DeVos’ Title IX rules. The new approach taken by this president, however, goes far beyond merely undoing his predecessor’s policies.
Instead, under President Biden, the DOE is proposing to revive President Obama’s old policies and treat
