The document indicates that while collegiate sports primarily emphasize competitive success, lower-grade environments may prioritize teamwork, fitness, and fundamental skills.
“Taking those considerations into account, the Department expects that, under its proposed regulation, elementary school students would generally be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity and that it would be particularly difficult for a school to justify excluding students immediately following elementary school from participating consistent with their gender identity,” the fact sheet wrote.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona stated in a press statement: “Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination. Being on a sports team is an important part of the school experience for students of all ages.”
“Today’s proposed rule is designed to support Title IX’s protection for equal athletics opportunity,” he added.
Some advocacy organizations see the new rules in the opposite light in that the Title IX rule change will allow biological males to compete in female sports.
Christiana Kiefer, a senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), wrote in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times: “The Biden administration’s proposed rules are a slap in the face to female athletes who deserve equal opportunity to compete in their sports. The Department of Education’s rewriting of Title IX degrades women and tells them that their athletic goals and placements do not matter.”
“When society and the law try to ignore reality, people get hurt. In sports, it’s women and girls who pay the price,” she added.
For LGBT advocacy groups, the new rule hasn’t come far enough.
“We are concerned about whether the proposed rule can properly eliminate the discrimination that transgender students experience due to the pervasive bias and ignorance about who they are,” said Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal. “These students must have full and equal chances to participate because participation in athletics provides many long-term benefits for young people, including important health benefits, and chances to develop leadership skills, discipline, and self-confidence.”
Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Washington-based think tank Heritage Foundation and a former senior counsel to the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, called the NCAA policy “laughably inadequate.”
“Let me be clear, one year of testosterone suppression therapy does nothing to change in any meaningful way the faster muscle twitch response, greater bone density, greater muscle mass, and higher lung capacity that biological boys possess when compared to girls,” said Perry during a recent testimony in Ohio. “Such biological distinctions, which give biological males a decided, if not overwhelming, advantage over females in athletic competition, cannot be suppressed, period.”
