Former President Donald Trump has promised to reverse the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX protections for transgender students on “day one” of his administration if he wins the election in November.
President Joe Biden has set a pro-transgender course for his administration, advancing various policies that promote gender ideology and special protections for individuals who identify as something different from their birth sex.
In a move that sparked widespread controversy and a bevy of lawsuits, the Department of Education (DOE) expanded the decades-old Title IX law, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools, to now include sexual orientation and “gender identity.” The changes, scheduled to go into effect on August 1, stop short of prohibiting schools from banning female-identifying male athletes from competing against females.
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President Trump, who previously pledged to punish doctors who provide so-called “gender-affirming” care to children, promised on Friday to undo the Biden administration’s Title IX changes.
“We’re gonna end it on day one,” President Trump said during a May 10 appearance on a conservative talk radio show in Philadelphia. “Don’t forget, that was done as an order from the president. That came down as an executive order. And we’re gonna change it—on day one it’s gonna be changed.”
Each administration has traditionally taken a different approach to the enforcement of Title IX regulations, which educational institutions must abide by to receive federal funding. President Biden’s executive order, signed on March 8, 2021, formally tasked the Education Department with changing Title IX to include protections for an educational environment free of “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The changes give female-identifying males the right to use female restrooms and locker rooms, and to join female-only organizations, while interpreting “harassment” as including the use of pronouns that conform to one’s biological sex rather than one’s chosen gender identity.
President Biden’s move sparked a torrent of conservative backlash, with over a dozen Republican-led states suing the administration and advising schools to ignore the transgender provisions of the new rules.
During his appearance on the talk show, President Trump assured conservatives concerned about the implications of the Title IX changes on women’s spaces, safety, and privacy.
“It‘ll be signed on day one,” he said of an executive order that would roll back the Title IX transgender provisions. “It’ll be terminated.”
Transgenderism has become a prominent issue in America’s social and political landscape in recent years, with those on the left tending to support “gender-affirming care” laws that, in some cases, block parents from having a say in their children’s decisions to undergo gender-change surgeries and other risky medical procedures.
Conservatives, by contrast, have supported laws that give parents more authority to prevent their children from undergoing transgender procedures or impose penalties on doctors who perform them without parental consent.
Nearly half of America’s states have passed legislation banning medical sex-change procedures for minors, according to data compiled by Movement Advance Project.
While some advocates of “gender-affirming” therapies and surgeries claim that they can help people suffering from gender dysphoria, there is little evidence for this.
A national organization of pediatricians recently released a policy statement saying that gender-transition procedures such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones provide no mental health benefit to youth with gender dysphoria.
“There are no long-term studies demonstrating benefits nor studies evaluating risks associated with the medical and surgical interventions” provided to adolescents with gender dysphoria, the American College of Pediatricians said in a Feb. 7 statement.
The group prepared the statement after reviewing more than 60 studies.
“There is no long-term evidence that mental health concerns are decreased or alleviated after ‘gender-affirming therapy,’” they wrote.
Many individuals who have undergone it “later regret those interventions and seek to align their gender identity with their sex,” they said.
“Because of the risks of social, medical, and surgical interventions, many European countries are now cautioning against these interventions while encouraging mental health therapy,” the group added.
A 2020 report from Finland raised concerns about the possibility that puberty blocker use “alters the course of gender identity development” and “may consolidate a gender identity that would have otherwise changed in some of the treated adolescents.”
A May 2022 report from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration stated that there were no studies comparing outcomes between those using puberty blockers and those not using puberty blockers among individuals with gender dysphoria.
