Happy Belated Title IX Anniversary!

June 24, 2025

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Title IX went into effect on June 23, 1972.

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,

Watch Candice Jackson, Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Education, break down why it’s so important to maintain the common understanding of the word sex, here.

On May 13, 2016, the Departments of Justice and Education under President Obama issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to schools all over the country, telling them to interpret the word sex to include the nebulous, sexist, homophobic concept of “gender identity.” A few months later, the group Women’s Liberation Front sued the Obama Administration for having done so (I was serving on the WoLF board of directors at the time). The suit was later dismissed without objection when the first Trump Administration withdrew the letter.

As we know, the Biden Administration tried numerous times throughout the course of the administration to do the exact same thing. The first several attempts were unsuccessful because several courts ruled that the administration had failed to issue public notice and provide an opportunity for comment.

In 2022, however, the Department of Education did issue public notice of a proposed formal rule change and invited the public to comment. The notice received over 250 thousand comments, which is more than any proposed rule change in Department history. Two years later, in April 2024, the Department announced that the rule was final and that all schools had to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all purposes under Title IX.

The summer of 2024 was a flurry of litigation, as numerous states sued the Department, complaining that the rewrite of the regulations exceeded the Department’s statutory authority (among other reasons, including that the final rule was “arbitrary and capricious”). Finally, in January of this year, a federal court completely vacated the final rule.

In his ruling, the judge said:

As this Court and others have explained, expanding the meaning of “on the basis of sex” to include “gender identity” turns Title IX on its head. While Title IX sought to level the playing field between men and women, it is rife with exceptions that allow males and females to be separated based on the enduring physical differences between the sexes.

Today, Title IX remains intact, and sex means sex. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found as much in December 2022, when it issued a decision in the matter of Adams v. St. John’s County. In that case, the court was asked, among other things, to determine whether the word “sex” was ambiguous at the time of the enactment of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It had no trouble determining that it was not:

Reputable dictionary definitions of “sex” from the time of Title IX’s enactment show that when Congress prohibited discrimination on the basis of “sex” in education, it meant biological sex, i.e., discrimination between males and females. See, e.g., Sex, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1976) (“The property or quality by which organisms are classified according to their reproductive functions.”); Sex, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1979) (same); Sex, Female, Male, Oxford English Dictionary (re-issued ed. 1978) (defining “sex” as “[e]ither of two divisions of organic beings distinguished as male and female respectively, “female” as “[b]elonging to the sex which bears offspring,” and “male” as “[o]f or belonging to the sex which begets offspring, or performs the fecundating function of generation”); Sex, Webster’s New World Dictionary (1972) (“[E]ither of the two divisions, male or female, into which persons, animals, or plants are divided, with reference to their reproductive functions.”); Sex, Female, Male, Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1969) (defining “sex” as “either of two divisions of organisms distinguished respectively as male or female,” “female” as “an individual that bears young or produces eggs as distinguished from one that begets young,” and “male” as “of, relating to, or being the sex that begets young by performing the fertilizing function”); Sex, Random House College Dictionary (rev. ed. 1980) (“[E]ither the male or female division of a species, esp. as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions”).

However, in blue states all over the country, male athletes are being permitted to compete in sports intended for women and girls, in blatant violation of the law. To the best of my knowledge, the current Departments of Education and Justice are investigating several of them.

Today, I write to celebrate yesterday’s Title IX anniversary. Women and girls will continue to exist as a sex class, and we will continue to fight for our sex-based rights and for material reality.