Florida, Texas, 3 other states reject Biden’s ‘illegal and unconstitutional’ Title IX rewrite they say undermines women’s rights

Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Louisiana have announced they will reject the rewrite by the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) of Title IX regulations, which essentially guts legal protections for women and men.

Title IX is a 1972 federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of biological sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding. President Biden hopes to expand that definition to include gender identity.

“Florida rejects Joe Biden’s attempt to rewrite Title IX. We will not comply and we will fight back,” said Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in a short video response posted on X.

DeSantis said Florida will not allow Biden to “try to inject men into women’s activities” or allow Biden to “undermine the rights of parents,” or “abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us here in Florida.”

DeSantis said Florida stood for opportunities for all people, not just the few favored by Democrats.

“We are not going to let Biden get away with it. We will not comply,” said DeSantis.  

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton has just announced a lawsuit against the Biden administration to stop the implementation of the new rules.  

“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” Paxton said. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality. Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.” 

In Oklahoma, State Superintendent Ryan Walters told all 542 school districts and charter schools in the state not to change policies to align with the Biden-imposed rule change, reported the Norman Transcript. 

Walters said the changes were “illegal and unconstitutional” and would be especially damaging to women.  

“I expect there will be litigation filed soon challenging the validity of these rules,” Walters said. 

Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley also cautioned that the new rules would hurt women and damage students, reported the National Desk.  

Brumley also warned that the Title IX policy is hardly silent about athletics, despite the Biden administration’s claims to the contrary. 

“While [DoE] claims these new rules do not speak to sports, the new rules explicitly mention athletics over 30 times. Clearly, sports in Louisiana could be impacted by the new rules and, if implemented, create a conflict with Louisiana law,” Brumley wrote, according to the National Desk.  

In South Carolina state Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver warned district superintendents across the state the revised rules would erase progress women have made under Title IX for the last 50 years. 

Weaver said it would turn the original 1972 statute “on its head,” said the National Desk.   

In an interview at USAToday, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos warned the revised rules would institute “campus kangaroo courts” at colleges in universities which would erase progress for women. 

Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is normally supportive of the LGBTQ agenda, is skeptical of certain aspects of the revised Title IX regulations. 

The ACLU and DeVos say the revisions deny people due process, and allow a single individual investigator to make all decisions on cases without oversight, similar to policies enacted under former President Barack Obama and terminated by Devos under former President Trump. 

“And this notion that we’re going to go back to what they call a single-investigator model, where one individual, usually someone who has a very left-leaning agenda of their own, is opening the investigations, doing the investigative work, deciding the outcome, and no one else is involved – that is simply unfair and unjust,” DeVos said. “And it can’t and won’t stand, ultimately.”