A federal judge with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky granted Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman’s preliminary injunction request to block the Biden Administration’s new Title IX rule from taking effect on Monday.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman urged a federal judge in Kentucky to block the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) finalized rule to rewrite Title IX to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation.
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The Biden administration’s changes to Title IX will reverse 50 years of progress for female athletes by allowing biological men to keep competing in women’s sports, pro-women’s sports leaders said Friday at an Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition rally.
The event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was one of the first stops on the coalition’s Take Back Title IX bus tour, which calls on America’s leaders to ensure equal protections for female athletes under the federal regulation.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch led a coalition of 13 other states in filing a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) final rule, which redefines the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on “sex” to include “gender identity.”
As of May 6, HHS’ final rule requires medical providers to perform surgeries and administer hormone drugs to both children and adults for the purpose of gender transition, without regard for a doctor’s medical judgment as to whether that treatment was appropriate.
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American federalism is alive and well after all. On April 19, the Biden Education Department announced its disastrous new Title IX rule that guts due process and imposes gender ideology in educational institutions. Within days, however, officials from eight states publicly instructed their schools to ignore it. Then, within a week, 16 states sued the administration alongside nonprofit groups such as Parents Defending Education and several Louisiana school districts. Since then, the number of states suing has climbed to 26—more than half the states in the nation. Their court filings say the rule violates not only the United States Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedures Act but also Title IX itself. Game on!
While feminists weaponized Title IX to their hearts’ content in the Obama years, alleging a phony campus rape crisis to rationalize their kangaroo courts and to silence those questioning their power, the world is a different place under Biden. Feminists have met their match in American parents and and in red states—especially their education officials.
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An Ohio senator wants state lawmakers to send a message to the U.S. Department of Education to exclude sexual orientation and gender identity from Title IX.
U.S. Rep. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, recently introduced Senate Concurrent Resolution 11 that calls on the Biden administration and Congress to remove all references from sexual orientation and gender identity from Title IX.
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In previous years, people might have missed the irony. But not now—not after the meteoric rise of women’s basketball.
When the WNBA champs visited the White House last week, reporters didn’t cover it out of obligation. They covered it because it was a real story. And President Joe Biden’s betrayal of girls sports only made it more of one.
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A Washington D.C.-based left-wing advocacy group called the Human Rights Campaign Foundation is behind a lawsuit against the Williamson County Board of Education challenging a state law that restricts students from using multi-person restrooms that do not match their sex.
The plaintiff, a transgender minor, is represented by two attorneys with the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a nonprofit organization under the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). HRC describes itself as “the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization” on its website with local groups in most states.
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Calling the Biden administration’s recent decision to include gender identity in Title IX “election-year pandering” and a threat to women — and the “truth” — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order telling schools in her state to ignore the guidance.
“The educational institutions of Arkansas will continue to enforce state law guaranteeing the right of students to maintain their privacy. Students must not be forced to shower or undress with members of the opposite sex,” states the executive order, signed Thursday by the Republican governor.
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Arkansas GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders ordered state officials to ignore the Biden administration’s latest changes to Title IX on Thursday, making Arkansas the latest state to fight back against the changes that add protections for transgender students.
The Department of Education finalized new rules related to Title IX last month, which expands the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity and pregnancy. Attorneys General in Louisiana and Texas have already filed lawsuits against the new changes, with Texas claiming that the new orders ignore the Constitution and harm women.
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Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr filed a lawsuit on Monday to safeguard women athletes from competing against biological males and to protect freedom of speech in schools against the Biden administration’s changes to the Title IX rule.
“Today we have taken action to defend women’s rights to fair competition,” Carr said in a press release on Monday, “and we will keep fighting until we end this absurdity once and for all.”
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the Biden administration’s finalized rule to rewrite Title IX is “extreme,” noting how the administration’s determination to rewrite anti-discrimination rules to encompass gender identity issues appears to be one of its “highest priorities.”
On Tuesday, Skrmetti led six states in suing the Biden administration’s Department of Education on Tuesday over its finalized rule to rewrite Title IX to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation.
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Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced on Tuesday that Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky are leading a coalition of states in a new lawsuit seeking to stop the Biden administration’s revisions to Title IX that critics argue endanger women and girls.
“The U.S. Department of Education has no authority to let boys into girls’ locker rooms,” Skrmetti stated. He charged, “Under this radical and illegal attempt to rewrite [Title IX], if a man enters a woman’s locker room and a woman complains that makes her uncomfortable, the woman will be subject to investigation and penalties for violating the man’s civil rights.”
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Locker rooms and bathrooms at schools that accept public funding are about to become dangerous places for women — even in states that have the kind of commonsense legislation intended to keep women’s private spaces private.
Last week, the Biden administration released a host of changes to Title IX, the federal legislation that is best known for dictating equal treatment of men and women in sports and for governing the way schools handle sexual assault charges. While the administration hasn’t yet decided whether biological men who identify as female should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, it redefined “sex” as “gender identity” in almost every other context while simultaneously allowing schools to violate the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault.
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Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, died 30 years ago this week—on April 22, 1994. And while it may be hard to remember a Republican the left despised more than Donald J. Trump—Nixon probably takes the cake.
It was not so much how the former California Congressman and two-term Vice President governed or his introverted personality but rather his adversarial relationship with a hostile media, his sheer determination, intelligence, lawyerly command of the facts, exceptional understanding of both foreign and domestic policy, and his effectiveness as commander in chief that caused the left to view Nixon as persona non grata.
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In a 2-1 ruling, the court ruled that the law violated Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination in schools.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a West Virginia law that banned transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
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The Georgia Senate passed a bill protecting women’s sports by 33 to 21 on Tuesday that would prevent biological males from unfairly competing in women’s and K-12 girls’ sports. The bill awaits transfer to the House for continued discussion.
HB 1104 seeks to safeguard “students from harm” and maintain “competitive fairness” in school sports by requiring athletes to compete in activities based on the gender listed on their birth certificate. The bill states that local schools may have “separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill, competitive fairness, student safety or the activity involved is a contact sport.”
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Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner expressed support for a New York county official’s order that bans women’s sports teams that include biological male athletes and men’s sports teams that include biological female athletes from using county-owned facilities.
Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, focused on transgender women competing in women’s sports during an event Monday alongside Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.
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Georgia Lt. Governor Burt Jones on Friday issued a statement celebrating the “courage” of Riley Gaines and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and a number of Georgia universities.
Jones commended the athletes “for their courage” and demanded the NCAA apologize and reverse course in a statement.
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The college horror stories are endless. A mandatory Title IX training session at Harvard instructs students that “fatphobia” and “cis-heterosexism” perpetuate violence and that using the wrong pronouns constitutes abuse. Yet, hatred against Jews is tolerated at the school.
In California, community colleges teach that if someone claims they are not a racist, they are in denial and that colorblindness “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.” A Michigan college held a “queer” abortion stories event earlier this year. The once-venerable University of Chicago is planning to host a “kink and consent” workshop for students, in which the practice of sex play with ropes will be taught.
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A group of Democrats are putting forward legislation to enshrine transgender sports in state statute and ban the removal of LGBT flags in many public places.
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have signed on to HF 4394 in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Authored by Rep. Leigh Finke, D-St. Paul, this bill would require the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) commissioner to develop a “gender inclusion policy” that must be adopted in some form by school districts across the state.
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Tennessee saw a slight increase in Title IX complaints at the 11 state agencies that reported those complaints, according to an audit from the Tennessee Comptroller.
There were 269 complaints from those 11 entities, compared to 265 in fiscal year 2022 and 171 in fiscal 2021.
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Arizona school district administrators advised social workers to conceal students’ gender transitions from their parents, a former school social worker told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cyndi O’Brien, a former social worker at Scottsdale Unified School District, recounted a September 2022-2023 meeting where she says district social workers were told that they were not required to call parents if a child comes out as transgender during a counseling session. Instead, O’Brien says social workers were told to only disclose this information if a parent or guardian explicitly asks about it. O’Brien first wrote her story anonymously for Scottsdale Unites For Education Integrity, a parental rights group, before sharing her identity with the DCNF.
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A federal judge in Wisconsin ordered a Milwaukee-area school district to allow biological male students who identify as female to use the girls’ bathroom and locker room facilities.
Eastern District of Wisconsin Judge Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee, in a ruling last week prohibited the Mukwonago Area School District from enforcing its policy requiring students to use the restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
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Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California claimed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was among those who “weaponized” the issue of men competing in women’s sports.
“I think the trans issue has — has come on as a more divisive issue in the context, particularly of sports, where it’s also been weaponized, and issues around pronouns,” Newsom said during a Wednesday interview with Fox 11 reporter Elex Michaelson. “I remember the first time I was on Zoom, and all of a sudden I saw these different pronouns. And that even took me, I was like, ‘What’s this?’ I didn’t fully understand that.”
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Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed two bills into law designed to reform public higher education institutions in Texas. One bans them from implementing DEI policies and another revises the tenure structure.
Both bills, authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, passed the legislature during the regular legislative session. Senate Bill 17 bans public colleges and universities from implementing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies that prioritize gender, race, ethnicity and ideological beliefs as factors for hiring or admission policies. Earlier this year, Gov. Abbott’s chief of staff sent a letter to public higher education institutions and state agencies saying if they were implementing DEI policies, they were violating federal law. In response, the heads of Texas colleges and universities said they were “pausing” and reviewing their DEI policies. The new law requires them to terminate them.
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The Sun Prairie Area School District now faces a civil rights complaint following an incident earlier this year involving an 18-year-old biological male identifying as a woman who exposed his genitals to four freshman girls in a high school shower.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed the sex discrimination complaint Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit heard arguments Tuesday in Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools in which four female athletes assert that the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s (CIAC) policy that allows males to compete in girls’ athletic competitions based on gender identity not only “create[s] an unfair playing field for female athletes,” but also “reverses nearly 50 years of athletic advances for women.”
Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith, and Ashley Nicoletti – all dedicated elite athletes from Connecticut – have all trained hard “for the personal satisfaction of victory, an opportunity to participate in state and regional meets, and a chance to earn a college scholarship,” according to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), their legal representatives.
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Democratic state Reps. Tod Ohnstad and Tip McGuire are pushing legislation that would make it a felony for school staff or volunteers to create an intimidating or hostile environment by sexually harassing students.
In addition to seeking to close a gap in the state’s criminal statutes that currently do not extend to all variations of sexual misconduct that some students have faced in schools, the bill would expand protections that now exist for public school students to all those who attend private schools.
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A professor told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he was fired and banned from a small college in Texas because of complaints from students and colleagues regarding his conservative beliefs.
St. Philip’s College (SPC), located in San Antonio, Texas, as part of the Alamo College District, declined to renew political science professor Will Moravits’ contract on March 27 after a Title IX investigation was launched in February regarding a student complaint that he made disparaging comments about the LGBTQ community during class, according to a documents obtained by the DCNF.
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The University of Minnesota recently held an event just for “BIPOC students” considering grad school, prompting a complaint to be filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleging racial discrimination.
As the feds review the complaint’s merits, the university scrubbed the event page and wiped information about the gathering from its website.
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Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has joined nearly two dozen state attorneys general imploring the Biden administration to protect female athletes by upholding Title IX.
The opposition from the coalition follows a proposal from the Department of Education to allow biological males to compete in female sports.
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The Biden administration’s proposal to ban schools from “categorically” excluding males from female sports teams would not only dissuade girls from athletic competition but inevitably spur more children to start puberty blockers and socially transition to a new gender identity, according to radical feminists who oppose gender ideology.
The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) joined right-of-center organizations in urging supporters to file comments supporting the preservation of female-only competition in the Department of Education’s Title IX notice of proposed rulemaking on “sex-related eligibility criteria.” More than 130,000 comments had been filed as of Monday afternoon, the last day to submit.
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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) joined Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and other GOP senators Tuesday in a public comment to Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that opposes the department’s proposed rule to expand Title IX to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports, and specifically points out how the rule will undermine the original intention of Title IX.
The education department’s proposed rule, titled “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance: Sex-Related Eligibility Criteria for Male and Female Athletic Teams” was published in the Federal Register on April 6.
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Oberlin College’s record on lawsuits is so bad that it hired a new role this school year – a dedicated risk manager.
The college most famously paid out $36.6 million to local Gibson’s Bakery after its administrators were found complicit in damaging and false accusations of racism against the town staple. The damaging accusations of racism came after a bakery employee chased several black individuals who stole alcohol in November 2016 out of the store.
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The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) announced Thursday it had filed a motion in court to have the venue of a lawsuit against the enforcement of an Arizona law changed from Tucson to Phoenix.
“Crucially, counsel for the parties are located in Phoenix. Even Plaintiffs are represented by local counsel in Phoenix, as is counsel for Superintendent [Tom] Horne. The result is that all of the Arizona lawyers are located in Phoenix, none are located in Tucson. That makes an overwhelming difference in the expense to the parties in litigating this case,” according to the motion, emailed to reporters.
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HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee – Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer for the University of Kentucky turned women’s sports advocate, told a group in her native Sumner County that the issue is not just a matter of fairness in sports but one of freedom of speech and denying objective truths.
Gaines spoke at the monthly meeting of the Sumner County Constitutional Republicans (SCCR), which moved across the road to the Beech Cumberland Church from its usual meeting location at the Shackle Island Fire Rescue building, due to the crowd size numbering well over 100.
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In a letter obtained by The Star News Network, four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) are calling upon House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to hold hearings on the Biden administration’s “radical and legally unsupported proposals to change Title IX” to require that its prohibition on sex discrimination be interpreted to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The letter, signed by USCCR Commissioners labor attorney Peter Kirsanow, University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot, Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams, and South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce CEO Stephen Gilchrist, asserts to McCarthy that the Biden Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has erred in its claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County “requires that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination be interpreted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
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As readers may be aware, in the spring of 2022 my colleagues and I at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty represented three eighth-grade boys who were accused by the Kiel Area School District of “sexual harassment” under Title IX for “mispronouning.”
As we pointed out, “mispronouning” does not violate Title IX and is not “sexual harassment” under any reasonable definition of that term, and punishing students for their speech violates the First Amendment. The district had also violated Title IX’s clear procedural requirements. We urged the district to drop its misguided investigation, and it ultimately did.
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Former President Donald Trump announced a plan Tuesday to protect the nation’s children from the “child abuse” of “chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation” at the bidding of radical gender ideology.
“The leftwing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse – very simple,” the 2024 presidential contender began laying out his vision. “Here’s my plan to stop the chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth.”
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An 18-state coalition led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a brief opposing the Biden administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX allowing transgender girls to participate in girls’ sports.
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An organization of female athletes sent a letter Thursday to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, demanding that the NCAA reverse its policy of allowing male athletes who identify as women to compete on women’s teams, or face legal action.
A group of current and former collegiate and professional female athletes also protested Thursday outside the NCAA convention in San Antonio, after the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, or ICONS, sent the letter.
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The Republican State Central and Executive Committee of Ohio passed a resolution during their January meeting to reject proposed changes to broaden the definition of sex-based harassment and discrimination to include gender identity and sexual orientation for LGBTQ students.
The committee resoundingly passed the resolution to “support parents, schools, and districts in rejecting harmful, coercive, and burdensome gender identity policies and to protect federal funding subject to Title IX.”
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The Ohio Board of Education passed a resolution Tuesday that rejects proposed changes to broaden the definition of sex-based harassment and discrimination to include gender identity and sexual orientation for LGBTQ students.
In a 10-7 vote, board members passed the resolution to “support parents, schools, and districts in rejecting harmful, coercive, and burdensome gender identity policies and to protect federal funding subject to Title IX.”
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In 2011, a “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) that required schools provide access to bathrooms, showers, and dorm rooms based on gender identity, rather than biological sex was introduced by the Obama Education Department. It defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”; required only that the alleged harassment potentially “interfere with or limit” access, rather than “deprive” the victim of access creating a “single-inquisitor” model where the investigator, prosecutor, and hearing officer could be the same person, and reduced the accused’s rights to a hearing to confront his accuser.
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Four female athletes are locked in a legal battle over transgender athletes that could set major precedent for the same fight playing out in schools around the country.
The four female athletes appealed to a federal court over a Connecticut policy allowing high school males identifying as females to compete against girls. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit heard Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools this week, where the girls’ legal team argued the policy is unfair to girls and hands female sports victories over to transgender athletes.
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The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services adopted a rule Friday that permanently bans changes in gender on birth certificates.
The rule asserts sex is “immutable” and gender is a “social construct.”
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed author Kara Dansky of the book, The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls to the newsmaker line to discuss the transgender movement, who is behind it, and why it is dangerous.
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From the feminist Women’s Liberation Front to the conservative Child & Parental Rights Campaign and Parents Defending Education, groups opposing the Biden administration’s proposal to redefine sex as “gender identity” are urging supporters to file comments in the Title IX regulatory proceeding before it closes Monday.
An 18-month-old nonprofit unexpectedly joined their ranks last week: the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), cofounded by black intellectuals including Columbia University’s John McWhorter and Brown University’s Glenn Loury, which fights identity politics in education and government and has focused mainly on race.
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The Biden administration is determined to undermine the science of biology in order to prop up an activist political agenda that will serve up a manufactured concept of limitless “genders” with a side order of government-approved child grooming opportunities.
The proposed Title IX rule, announced in June by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, is designed to overturn the Trump administration’s desire to continue enforcement of Title IX’s protections for girls and women in education. Former President Donald Trump also ensured due process rights protections for those students accused of sexual misconduct.
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