Are Title IX Protections for Women’s Sports About To Disappear?

As winter gives way to spring, many athletes across the country will welcome the return of sunshine and warmth. But this spring holds something insidious for half of the sports community. The Biden administration has promised to announce new changes to Title IX—changes that will undo decades of groundbreaking achievements for women and girls seeking equal athletic opportunities. And now even a top United Nations expert is sounding the alarm on where America is headed if it doesn’t reverse course.

The administration’s proposal would require schools to allow male athletes to participate on female sports teams. We don’t have to look far to see the effects of such a policy. From coast to coast, women and girls suffer when radical ideology replaces biological reality.

In Connecticut, four female student athletes were forced to compete against males and as a result, were deprived of honors and opportunities at elite track-and-field levels. Attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom are representing the athletes—Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith, and Ashley Nicoletti—in a lawsuit because the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference adopted a policy that allows males who identify as female to compete in girls’ athletic events. Those male athletes won 15 women’s track championship titles—titles that were once held by nine different girls.

In Idaho, collegiate athletes Madison Kenyon and Mary Kate Marshall know from personal experience how demoralizing it is to train your hardest and best, only to be forced to compete against a male—and be pushed down in the rankings.

From World Masters’ athletes to middle-school girls in West Virginia, from NCAA swimmers to skateboarders, every woman and girl must be allowed to compete on a fair and level playing field, with other women. This is not only basic common sense and the right thing to do—it also complies with the United States’ international human rights obligations.

In a recent official communication to the U.S. government, Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, called out the administration’s proposed changes to Title IX as an impending human rights violation. “If the proposed changes are adopted,” she wrote, “they would contravene the United States’ international human rights obligations and commitments concerning the prevention of all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls on the basis of sex.”

Indeed, the administration’s proposal would not only result in the “loss of athletic and scholarship opportunities” for women but, as Alsalem explains, could also cause women and girls to suffer “the loss of privacy, an increased risk of physical injury, heightened exposure to sexual harassment and voyeurism, as well as a more frequent and accumulated psychological distress.”

We’ve already seen what’s at stake. School districts assigning girls to share hotel rooms with male students on overnight trips without notifying the students’ parents. Government officials trying to force a shelter for women who are victims of domestic and sexual abuse to provide a bed for a drunk, belligerent man wearing a dress and claiming to be female. School officials placing girls in awkward and vulnerable positions by allowing male students to use their locker rooms and restrooms.

The irony is that Title IX was adopted to remove obstacles to women’s flourishing. Title IX is the main legal bulwark against sex discrimination in college admissions and financial assistance, sexual harassment on campus, and discrimination based on pregnancy status. And it has been instrumental in expanding athletic opportunities for women and girls. In 1972, the year of its adoption, male high school athletes in America outnumbered female athletes 12 to 1. Today, that ratio has shrunk to nearly four to three.

With this policy proposal, the administration is threatening to gut the protections that have done so much to advance the rights of women and girls over the last half century. Women are equal to men, but they are also fundamentally different—a fact I never thought we’d have to defend in court. When law and policy refuse to reflect truth, it is women and girls who bear the cost. The world is watching to see whether the Biden administration will prioritize the protection and safety of women and girls or its own radical agenda.

Kristen Waggoner is CEO, president, and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom. Follow Kristen on Twitter @KWaggonerADF or follow ADF @ADFLegal.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.