Biden taints Title IX with gender ideology; women, children, religious freedom hardest hit

Schoolchildren, college students and families wrapping up the school year should enjoy summer while it lasts, because the next school year will be a wild one.  

More than 20 states, ranging from Georgia to Idaho, have recently filed lawsuits against the federal government for its overreach in attempting to impose gender ideology in education. The lawsuits contest the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education, to include “gender identity.” 

The rewrite of Title IX requires states and educational institutions to ignore biological sex and instead make decisions about programs, bathrooms and locker rooms based on gender identity. So much for fairness and the respect for the religious freedom of Americans who believe in biology, and that we are given our sex by God. 

We should brace ourselves. The Biden administration’s tangled web of federal rules and guidances, designed to force-feed the nation progressive fantasies about gender, go beyond our schools. They are also corrupting our workplaces, humanitarian efforts and health care. It’s pretty scary stuff, and it’s a fundamental failure of the administration’s obligation to safeguard religious freedom. 

How could this have happened without legislative mandates? Unfortunately, it began at the Supreme Court.  

In June 2020, the Supreme Court issued Bostock v. Clayton County, a disastrous decision expanding the reach of Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination in the workplace to encompass discrimination because of an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.  

Justice Neil Gorsuch, author of the court’s majority opinion, dismissed concerns that the decision would “sweep beyond Title VII to other federal or state laws that prohibit sex discrimination.” He naively wrote that “none of these other laws are before us; we have not had the benefit of adversarial testing about the meaning of their terms, and we do not prejudge any such question today.” He then made matters worse by asserting that the tension between religious liberty and Title VII will raise “questions for future cases too.” In a scathing dissent, Justice Samuel Alito warned his colleagues that the decision “is virtually certain to have far-reaching consequences.”

His prediction came true in short order when, on the day of his inauguration, President Biden issued an executive order announcing that “it is the policy of my administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation” and directing federal agencies to implement this policy. The Title IX rules mentioned above are just one fruit of this poisonous tree.  

So much for free speech and religious liberty in the workplace. 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, purportedly a bipartisan federal agency, has also issued enforcement guidance that imposes speech codes in the workplace. “Harassment,” according to this guidance, includes “intentional and repeated use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s gender identity (misgendering).” Admittedly, the guidance states that employers should accommodate employees’ sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, and observances. But there’s a catch, of course. Employers can ignore religious beliefs if doing so “creates, or reasonably threatens to create, a hostile work environment.”  

The State Department has similarly proposed rules extending its nondiscrimination requirements governing award recipients and contractors for foreign assistance to include “gender identity or expression.” Given Biden’s executive order, charitable groups unwilling to embrace gender ideology shouldn’t hold their breath for a waiver under the rules. So much for charity to those in need and religious freedom globally. 

In addition to imposing a transgender speech code on its employees, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also finalized rules for foster children. State agencies must now guarantee that these children are placed with providers willing to “utilize the child’s identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression.” Also, inserting gender identity into the nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act will force medical professionals and insurance providers to perform or pay for gender transition procedures, including on children.  

You might think HHS would be more circumspect when dealing with children identifying inconsistently with their biological sex, especially as European countries are now discovering the horrible damage done to young people experimented upon by gender ideologues in the health industry. But no — Biden’s administrative state doesn’t do circumspection when it comes to fashionable dogma.

In the Book of Genesis, it is written: “God created mankind in His image; in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.” No new federal rule or guidance can rewrite this truth, but that won’t stop the Biden administration from trying.  

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project and an expert on religious freedom.