In celebration of the 52nd anniversary of Title IX being signed into law, Speaker Johnson hosted a panel discussion on the importance of protecting Title IX, the rights of women and girls, and the Biden Administration’s radical rewrite of the law, which is being challenged in court. The panel included former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Rep. Virginia Foxx, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, and Independent Women’s Forum chairwoman Heather Higgins.
“We’re here celebrating the 52nd Anniversary of Title IX, which remains critically important today because the rights of women are under attack. On his first day in office, Joe Biden essentially said he was going to gut Title IX protections, and later, the Department of Education announced it was rewriting Title IX in a way that would have devastating effects for women in our schools and universities, including for women’s sports…We have agencies in the federal government that have truly been weaponized against the very people that these agencies are designed to serve and protect,” Speaker Johnson said.
“There’s a reason why there’s only 37 words in the original law, because it’s a very clear, common sense approach to how we deal with giving women equal opportunity,” Secretary DeVos said. “And there’s a reason why the regulation that we went through during our administration has withstood legal tests, because we follow the law. The regulations…that the Obama and Biden Administrations have put forward simply aren’t following the law… It is time to return to the original intent of Title IX and have common sense prevail again.”
“What we want to do is again protect the rights that women won in Title IX…We have passed out of committee representative Miller’s Congressional Review Act, which we will bring to the floor, I hope soon…The Congressional Review Act would roll back these new rules put out by the Biden administration, that negate most of the work that was done under Secretary DeVos, which was extraordinarily thoughtful and well done,” Chairwoman Foxx said.
“The Biden administration is waging the most anti-woman, anti-reality pursuit in history. They are taking the original 37 words of the landmark sex-equality law and creating an entirely new proposal that’s almost half a million words,” Riley Gaines said. “They are stripping all sex-based protections for women and girls — robbing women of equal opportunity, privacy, and fairness. Equating ‘sex’ with ‘gender identity’ effectively abolishes the original intent of Title IX. This doesn’t enforce Title IX, it violates it.”
“While the administration disingenuously claims that the new rule doesn’t apply to sports, they’ve established the default position that school activities limited to biological women or biological men are presumptively discriminatory,” Heather Higgins said. “The administration has repeatedly insisted, in court filings and in public pronouncements, that Title IX requires schools to allow trans-identified males to play women’s sports. They can’t have it both ways. Either they use Title IX to force schools to allow men on women’s sports teams, or if they are not, then schools should stop the madness right now.”