Dear Friends,
This week, I filed a lawsuit with three other states challenging the Biden Administration’s disturbing re-write of Title IX, the law that has protected women in our education systems since 1972. Title IX protected women’s access to educational opportunities, school sports, services, participation, and facilities without discrimination. That was, until Biden’s bureaucrats added in two little words that changed everything: “gender identity.”
This change now allows biological men into girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, changing facilities and those places held as private and safe. It jeopardizes their safety, their dignity, their privacy, and everything one would expect from those facilities. It mandates the use of “preferred pronouns” in schools, without question. It allows transgender males to compete in women’s sports, stripping away opportunities for athletic scholarships and achievement because of biological advantages, exploited by the phenomena of “gender identity.” Everything Title IX was designed to protect for women – plus decades of progress and opportunity – the Biden Administration has undone with the stroke of a pen. Reason and common sense are abandoned for political theater in an election year.
Idaho has already passed laws that protect women’s sports in schools, keeps biological males out of women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, and prohibits the mandated use of preferred pronouns in schools. The Biden Administration has a terrible habit of using federal rules to bypass Congress and to undermine state laws. Now they are threatening to withhold substantial education funding for non-compliance with their Title IX changes – a direct afront to Idaho’s existing protections for women.
Our Title IX lawsuit against the federal government is specifically to defend Idaho’s right to enact our own laws. Our priorities have not changed. The Biden Administration may be willing to sacrifice the safety, security, and opportunities for women from kindergarten through college, but I am not. This corruption of Title IX will not stand.
Best regards,
