Department Of Education rule to enshrine protections for ‘gender identity’ heads to White House

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – A policy that will codify protections for “transgender” students and change how schools respond to sexual misconduct on campus was sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review Friday, according to a government website.

The policy will unravel former Education Secretary Betsy Devos’ Title IX rule, which ordered schools to conduct cross-examination during sexual misconduct investigations and conduct live hearings of them, according to Politico. Democrats and civil rights groups have been pressuring the Department of Education (ED) to finalize the rule, which would codify protections for “gender identity.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to ensuring all students are guaranteed an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex,” an ED spokesperson told Politico. “The Department of Education has taken the next step to advance a rule, first proposed in 2022, that strengthens protections for students from sexual harassment and for LGBTQI+ students.”

Experts previously said that the move to rewrite Title IX by the Biden administration imperils women’s sports and weakens due process rights. The rules would require faculty to report improper use of a “transgender” person’s “pronouns” to the campus Title IX coordinator, Bob Eitel, Defense of Freedom Institute co-founder who helped DeVos create the Trump administration’s Title IX policy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“So for instance if you have a biology teacher who has a transgender students who identifies as female but is biologically male, and there is a teacher’s aide in the classroom and that biology teacher refers to the male student who identifies as a female as ‘Mr. So and So,’ the teacher’s aid who observes that would be obligated as a matter of law under the standards proposed by the Biden administration to report that incident to the Title IX coordinator,” Eitel told the DCNF.

The ED also has a separate deadline of March 2024 for a section regarding athletic eligibility that proposed outlawing transgender students’ sports participation bans, according to Politico.

“The Department is still reviewing a second rule related to athletics, which was first proposed nine months after the first rule, and which received 150,000 public comments which by law must be carefully considered,” the department spokesperson said, according to Politico.

The ED did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.