Magnolia State News

(Jackson, Mississippi) Attorney General Lynn Fitch today led a 22-statecoalition of Attorneys General in urging the Biden Administration to upholdTitle IX protections for girls and women.

On April 13, 2023, the Department of Education proposed an over reaching, unlawful rule that strips states of their power and duty to protect the equality, privacy and safety of females by preventing biological males from competing in female sports.

In multiple comment letters to the U.S. Department of Education, Attorneys General from nearly two dozen states voiced their opposition to the proposed rule, stating that the rule disregards five decades of evidence showing the benefits of applying the traditional definition of biological sex in sports. The Attorneys General argue that it ignores basic considerations of privacy and dignity, fails to meet the Department’s duty to analyze costs and benefits, exceeds the agency’s authority, impermissibly preempts duly enacted state laws, injects uncertainty into student athletics and threatens the progress Title IX has ushered in for women and girls over the past 50 years.“

For decades, women have enjoyed a far fairer playing field thanks to successful, commonsense laws like Title IX," said Attorney General Lynn Fitch. "The Biden Administration’s attempts to devalue women’s unique need sand contributions will reverse decades of progress. We must continue our efforts to empower women by offering safe spaces for women to engage with one another in athletics, education, fellowship, and sometimes even in healing."

In the letter led by General Fitch, the Attorneys General write, “Engrafting the deliberately vague, undefined, and malleable concept of gender identity onto Title IX – and subjecting schools to an extreme form of intermediate scrutiny if they try to continue to uphold Title IX’s aims – will do a great disservice to our Nation’s student athletes. Instead of advancing the mission that Title IX started more than 50 years ago, the proposed rule would take a large leap toward erasing many women and girls from competitive sports.” 

Attorneys General from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia joined General Fitch in filing this comment letter.

Read the letter here. 

General Fitch also joined letters led by Attorneys General from Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas. 

In a letter led by Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, the Attorneys General write, “The Proposed Regulation seeks to balance gender identity and sex, but its proposal for how States do so is self-contradictory and utterly un-administrable. On the one hand, a student’s identification as transgender triggers a complex, individualized assessment of that student’s athletic performance. On the other hand, the Proposed Regulation discourages States from asking whether any student is transgender in the first place because it  says coming out as transgender is ‘extremely traumatic.’... The Department’s failure to grapple with those questions alone means this Department has not seriously considered how anyone could ever apply with the Proposed Regulation, and that alone requires that it be rejected.”

In a letter led by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, the Attorneys General write, “For support and justification, the Proposed Rule erroneously cites A.M. v. Indianapolis Pub. Schs .... One district court’s now-vacated preliminary assessment that relies on bathroom-access precedents rather than sports participation cases cannot bear the weight the Department places on it. It was never ‘courts’ plural, and it was never final or reviewed. Indiana’s statute continues to apply in all cases and the Department’s suggestion otherwise is deceptive.”

In a letter led by Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, the Attorneys General write, “It is a telling illustration that Kansas native Jim Ryun (a male track athlete and, later, a Congressman) was the first high-school athlete to run a mile in under four minutes back in 1964, when he was seventeen years old. Since then, ten other high-school boys have broken the four-minute mark in the United States alone. To this day, however, no woman of any age or any nationality has run the mile that quickly; the women’s world record hasn’t even yet reached 4:11.” 

In a letter led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, the Attorneys General write, “It makes little sense to read Title IX as rigorously policing ‘sex-related criteria’ for determining whether someone is a boy or a girl when trying out for an athletics team while the statute itself categorically allows separating locker rooms using biological sex. For nearly half a century, Title IX regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations have allowed, and sometimes required, schools to separate the two sexes in athletics and other contexts.” In a letter led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Attorneys General rite, “[I]t is clear from the well-publicized reality of the transgender athlete phenomenon, the Department’s own language in the Proposed Rule, and the cases the Proposed Rule cites, that the burden of accommodating trans-identifying or nonbinary athletes goes primarily one way: it forces States to

allow biological men to compete in women’s sports.

Original source can be found here