In Joe Biden's America, Women are Forgotten
As an attorney working with women to keep their spaces safe and fair, I’ve had the opportunity to hear a lot of stories and frustrations from young women who have felt they have no choice but to let men into areas reserved for women.
As multiple parties file lawsuits against the Biden administration for erasing the lines between girls and boys at school, one story particularly stands out.
At 11 years old, a middle school girl in Oklahoma entered the girls' restroom, at school, and was surprised to find a male student in her restroom.
Scared and confused, she yelled at him and asked him why he was there.
This made her feel so uncomfortable that she progressively went from checking to see if there were any male students in the girls' room to avoiding using the school restroom altogether — which meant waiting nearly nine hours from getting on the bus to getting off the bus at home.
When her parents found out what she was doing, they were outraged.
She explained that the teachers made her feel that this situation was normal, and that she could not object.
At first, only the male classmates who claimed to identify as girls used the girls’ bathroom, but over time other male classmates used the girls’ restroom because they knew they could get away with it.
Soon, this young girl’s friends and peers started avoiding the restroom as well, because they felt so uncomfortable using these private spaces knowing a male student could walk in.
Thankfully, Oklahoma passed a law that respects women’s privacy in the restroom.
But the Biden administration is trying to overrule that protection.
This latest overreach regarding Title IX threatens to dismantle all the progress we’ve made in over 50 years since its signing.
The U.S. Department of Education is attempting to use the same federal law that enhanced women’s opportunities to remove distinctions between men and women by redefining "sex" in federal law to include "gender identity" with zero regard to biology.
A male who claims a female identity will have access to spaces specifically carved out for women in Title IX — locker rooms, showers, bedrooms, beds on overnight trips, and athletic competitions.
The response has been swift since women will be left behind if this attempt to rewrite Title IX succeeds.
Alliance Defending Freedom, where I serve as legal counsel, has joined multiple lawsuits to uphold state laws that respect women’s privacy, dignity, and safety.
And we just recently joined a lawsuit on behalf of the Oklahoma middle school girl who doesn’t want to have to fear using the school girls’ room again.
We’re already seeing the results of where this ideology will take us. Several young women in Connecticut were displaced by two male athletes thanks to a state policy that allowed them to compete in women’s high school track and field.
In 2022, Lia Thomas dominated women’s swimming after posting just average times in men’s swimming.
Then Thomas’ female teammates were forced to shower in the same locker room with Thomas. When Loudoun County, Virginia, was under the microscope for policies that allowed male students to access female spaces, a sexual assault cover-up surfaced, leading a grand jury to conclude that school officials "failed at every juncture" and showed a "stunning lack of openness, transparency and accountability, both to the public and to the special grand jury."
After a male student challenged a West Virginia law that protects women’s sports, a young girl faced sexual harassment from that male student who gained access to the girls' track team and locker room.
School administrators did nothing to help her.
When politics takes priority over science and safety, women are left out and victimized.
As the Biden administration pushes us toward this dark future, other nations are headed in a different direction — notably England.
After a highly publicized lawsuit involving a young woman who was pushed into believing she was a man and then subjected to irreversible and life-damaging procedures, the National Health System decided to close its central pediatric gender clinic in 2022.
The NHS also commissioned Dr. Hilary Cass to examine the efficacy of these so-called "treatments," and her study concluded that children struggling with their biological sex deserve better care and that, "Polarization and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse, and in the long run will also hamper the research that is essential to finding the best way of supporting them to thrive."
These young people do deserve better.
And women deserve better, too.
The Biden administration’s redefinition is demonstrably dangerous.
It’s time that we protect women, not ignore or redefine them.
Rachel Rouleau is Legal Counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).
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