8min chapter

The Alisa Childers Podcast cover image

#246 Title IX, Public Schools, Women's Sports, and Everything Else Happening in Culture, with John Stonestreet

The Alisa Childers Podcast

CHAPTER

Unpacking Title IX: Evolution and Controversies

Exploring the history and impacts of Title IX, including regulatory shifts and interpretations under different administrations. Focus on complexities like men in women's sports and recent laws affecting gender identity and discrimination.

00:00
Speaker 1
So this was designed to ensure that women had equal opportunities and access to educational opportunities, educational programs, or think about, you know, housing, lodging, classes, degree programs, scholarship dollars, sports, you know, things like that. Okay. What's happened now with the growth of the Regulative State when we vote for a president, we don't just vote between two men or two candidates. We vote for about 5000 people. And these are people that come along with the administration and are put into positions of power or influence or control over various departments. And we have seen over the last several years just how dramatically different these departments can look from one administration to the other. I think particularly in three areas. Number one, health and human services. So if you go back, for example, under President Obama, there was a secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, again, not elected, came along as an appointment because President Obama was elected. And she famously issued what was called the contraceptive mandate, and which employers had to provide contraception at their own cost to their employees. And she defined contraceptive in a way that included abortifacients, medication that would cause abortion. And she also redefined who was actually required to participate in a way that really reduced down who counts as a nonprofit group. So the famous outcome here was a group of nuns were forced to provide contraception. Now, where did that come from? How could the state just do that? That wasn't a law that was passed in the legislation by the legislature. That wasn't anything that Congress ever dealt with. It was an unelected bureaucratic official over a particular department that wrote a rule. These rules are tend to be interpretations of law that's already in place. That's what's happened here in Title IX. So when Betsy DeVos was the secretary of education under President Trump, she did the same thing. She wrote laws having to do with how to interpret one thing she did, for example, in Title IX, is that the previous secretary of education had written a law that made it very easy to accuse a man of sexual abuse and rape on a college campus. So you might remember hearing things back then about rape culture on college campuses, and that we needed to trust the accuser and so on and so on. Now, there are terrible instances of sexual abuse, assault, harassment, rape on college campuses. So the way that that secretary of education dealt with it, and I can't remember who that was under President Obama, was to make it very easy for those accusations to go forward. Betsy DeVos thought that that went too far. It enabled retribution. It enabled things that weren't healthy. And so she backed off of that. So that's an example of how this can go different ways. The most obvious example now, given the cultural moment we're in, and this has to do with the undercurrents creating the waves, Title IX as a wave, the undercurrent, of course, has to do with the sexual brokenness, the L, the G, the T, the Q, the I, the A, being the examples of normalizing sexual behavior and sexual identity alternatives across culture. So there was thought, you know, what was going to come out of this Department of Education for Title IX, and what was it going to do to women's access? So again, remember, Title IX was initiated to enable women's access and opportunities. But we're in a cultural moment where we can't define what a woman is, or we define a woman to include men who identify or address as presurgical, post-surgical, or whatever. We all know the story of Riley Gaines, the swimmer from the University of Kentucky, who looks over in the locker room. And there's a, you know, presurgical male. I don't even know, this language is so problematic. It's made
Speaker 2
it really hard to even talk about it, right? Because the words have been
Speaker 1
changed so much. Here is, yeah, I don't even want to say biological male, because it's not like there's a biological male on a non-biological male, it's just male and female, right? So there's a male, and not only took away the win that Riley had exclusively, I think they tied in this particular race, but then also violated private spaces. Title IX is designed to protect private spaces and protect sports opportunities. President Biden has, in fact, his Department of Education has in fact issued new regulations of Title IX that give men full access to women's sports and private spaces. And to not do so then, because it's put into this category of legislation that has to do with discrimination and civil rights and equal opportunity, means that if a man is not allowed into a woman's spaces or opportunities or scholarships or whatever, then essentially what you end up having is discrimination. In the same way, that we were trying to correct, think about back in the civil rights era, if a black family were driving across the south to go visit loved ones or just to go on vacation, they may have reached parts of the country where they couldn't find a hotel or they couldn't find a restaurant or they couldn't get gas for their car. In other words, these were things that limited their participation in public life. So now we're putting this on the same level as that. I'll give you another example of how this is playing out on the state level. I live in Colorado. In Colorado, just passed and signed a law, which said that teachers had to refer to students by any chosen name they give. This is not even about pronouns anymore. Literally what this means is if I'm a student and I demand that my teacher calls me he today, cat tomorrow, zer the next day, and robot the next day, the teacher has to acknowledge and abide by whatever I demand as a student. And if they don't, this is the other part of it, because this is the same force of the Title IX regulation on a federal level as this is having on a state level. To not do so is discrimination. Now that word discrimination has a very specific history, has a very specific meaning. Literally what the state of Colorado was saying is, if a teacher refers to refuse to a student as a cat, like the student demands, that is the same thing as using a racial slur against a student of ethnic minority. Do you hear that these are issues, but they smuggle in these definitions and ideas that are just wow, what we're smuggling in in the Title IX rewrite is that there's really nothing to a woman other than a label.

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