Feminists petition Dept. of Ed. to grant girls' sports reprieve from Biden’s transgender EO
A radical feminist group has submitted a petition to the Department of Education urging the federal government to protect girls'-only athletics in response to President Joe Biden's executive order allowing boys who identify as female to compete against girls.
Women's Liberation Front filed the petition this week, asking the Biden administration to protect Title IX — a provision in the Civil Rights Act guaranteeing nondiscrimination on the basis of sex in the educational arena, including sports — for women and girls.
The effort is in response to Biden's signing of an executive order on his first day in office that requires federal agencies to interpret "sex" to include "sexual orientation and gender identity," and create new regulations in keeping with this redefinition. Women's Liberation Front contends that the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity is wrongheaded and that "gender identity" amounts to an erasure of women's hard-won sex-based rights under the law.
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Women's Liberation Front's petition asks the Department of Education to affirm that sex as defined in Title IX is strictly biological; that gender identity is "a person's belief that they have an internal sense of self-identification as male, female, both, or neither, that is incongruent with one's sex." That sports and single-sex spaces and services are not based on someone's beliefs about their sex, and that truthful statements about biological sex, rooted in material reality, is free speech protected under the First Amendment.
The agency has 60 days to respond to the petition.
Natasha Chart, executive director of Women's Liberation Front, said in a statement that the petition "is an important first step toward holding the Biden administration accountable for how their policies will harm women and girls. Feminists are stepping up to defend the rights that previous generations fought for."
The radical feminist organization conducted a national poll last year with SPRY Strategies about the issue of allowing trans-identified athletes to compete in girls' sports, finding that 67% of respondents — which included both liberal and conservative voters in liberal and conservative states — objected to allowing males, regardless of how they identify, compete in female athletics.
Women's sports has become one of the most visible areas where public officials have vocalized concerns about the impact of transgender ideology.
Several state legislatures are considering bills prohibiting males who identify as transgender from participating in girls' sports as Idaho did last year. Idaho's law establishing that sports at the middle, high school and collegiate level in the state must be sex-segregated is now being litigated in federal court.
On Wednesday, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said that permitting transgender-identified males to compete with females would "destroy women's sports," according to the Tennessean.
His remark followed the advance of a bill in the lower chamber on Tuesday requiring middle and high school student-athletes to participate in school sports on the basis of their biological sex.
Sponsored by Rep. Scott Cepicky, R-Culleoka, the proposed law emphasizes that boys have several physiological advantages over girls and could thus cause bodily injury to female athletes and that allowing them to compete against girls is unfair. Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald, is carrying the bill in the state Senate.
