LAST CHANCE to tell Biden that Title IX must protect trans youth.
LAST CHANCE to tell Biden that Title IX must protect trans youth.
Comments are due today. Read below for very easy instructions!
Hi, friends. Today is the final day to submit public comments to the Biden administration to tell them that they MUST strengthen protections for transgender youth under Title IX.
We *know* that the anti-trans community is extremely organized and vocal, so it is imperative that we make our voices in support of trans inclusion in sports heard.
Thankfully, the Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic and the National Women’s Law Center have partnered to create a phenomenal toolkit full of information and to ensure it is super simple to submit your comment.
It is very easy to submit a comment TODAY:
Simply go to the form at the bottom of this page and fill in your name. You will then be provided with a template letter that you can submit directly, or you can personalize your own letter and submit it through the same portal! Very easy.
Here is a link to Friday’s newsletter, which provides more information on the rule and what needs to be changed. I have also included a copy of the comment that I submitted below.
Here is the comment I submitted:
Feel free to borrow from this as well — it includes language from the NWLC’s template and previous Power Plays newsletters.
I support the Department of Education (“Department”) taking action to protect the rights of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students to play school sports.
But it is IMPERATIVE that the Department strengthen its Title IX rule so that these students can access the full benefits of an education, including by playing school sports as they are.
On the very first day that Biden took office, he issued the “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” Among other things, that order – using the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling as its basis – mandated that transgender students be allowed to use the locker rooms and bathrooms of their gender identity, and participate in the sport of their gender identity.
It was clear that Biden wanted trans youth to have the right to play sports.
Unfortunately, conservative groups seized on Biden’s guidance, and immediately escalated anti-transgender campaigns that had been building across the country. Many of the groups behind those campaigns – who frequently misgender transgender people and support extremely harmful policies that aim to ban transgender people, and often LGBTQ people as a collective, from public life – accused Biden of ending women’s sports with his executive order.
But I am a journalist that focuses exclusively on women’s sports, and therefore has spent an inordinate amount of time over the past 14 years researching and reporting on the barriers that women’s sports still face. And I can guarantee you that trans athletes are not a threat to women’s sports.
In reality, these trans bans are a threat to women’s sports because they can allow anyone to accuse any student athlete of not “really” being a woman or a girl. Many times, this leads to “sex testing,” which includes horrific and invasive practices like genital inspections or hormonal tests for students to “prove” their gender. Sex testing invades students' privacy, is often enforced arbitrarily based on prejudice, and sends deeply stigmatizing and damaging messages to all youth that are completely inconsistent with a supportive educational environment. Additionally, sex testing disproportionally impacts Black and brown girls and women.
The Department should make clear that restrictions on transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students’ ability to play sports are *never permitted* at the K-12 or club college level, and should *explicitly state* that requiring sex testing of student athletes violates Title IX.
In a world where the transgender community is facing a non-stop onslaught of bigotry and discrimination, the Biden administration must work to protect these vulnerable Americans, not add to their marginalization by attempting to find a compromise with bad-faith actors who want to eradicate the trans community as a whole.
We know that transgender youth are significantly more likely than cisgender youth to report having been bullied at school or online. We also know that trans youth who have been bullied have far greater rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts than the general population.
But sports can help that. Transgender and nonbinary athletes have higher grades and lower rates of depressive symptoms than trans and nonbinary youth who don’t play sports. Unfortunately, exposure to trans-exclusionary sports policies was cited as the underlying reason why more than one-third of LGBTQ youth – both athletes and non-athletes – did not expect or plan to graduate high school.
So with trans-inclusive policies, transgender athletes and nonathletes are more likely attend school and graduate, and less likely to be depressed and commit suicide. That should be the end of this debate.
I encourage the Department to strengthen its Title IX protections for trans athletes, and return to the promise that Biden made on his very first day in office.
You have until the end of the day today, May 15, so go ahead and get it done while you’re thinking about it!