Title IX Must Be Destroyed in the Name of Saving Women and Girls from Sports
The first time I heard the words “Title Nine” I was in junior high. It was the ’90s, and those two words together had no meaning to me.
One could argue that my school should’ve been teaching middle schoolers about civil rights law. But don’t worry. I wasn't taught about civil rights in high school or college, either. I learned about Title IX by reading a lot of feminist nonfiction in my teens that radicalized me and turned me into a lesbian.
The law, as written, begins, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
In other words, if you’re getting money from the feds, you aren’t allowed to discriminate against one sex or the other. But who are we kidding? It was 1972. People weren’t discriminating against men. And I’ll tell you a secret: they still aren’t. It’s not discrimination to call out toxic masculinity and to no longer tolerate it, which is what is happening when a lot of men claim they’re getting “canceled” for being a man.
Title IX was largely seen as a civil rights victory for women.
While Title IX touched upon multiple areas of life, the most mentioned is school sports. The entire concept of girls’ or women’s athletic programs barely existed before Title IX.
Because 1972 was even more blatantly sexist than 2026 — and, let’s face it, that’s thanks to legal requirements, not to changing attitudes. After all, we elected Trump twice when he was running against much more qualified women. The prevailing attitude was that boys were serious about sports and girls didn’t even want to play. And even if they did want to play, girls would be terrible because they had no athletic talent or prowess.
As a result, there was a big disparity between how boys' sports programs were treated compared to girls playing sports. The boys’ sports programs got all of the good coaches and the best training and playing facilities. The boys also got uniforms and equipment. They got to play against other organized teams in real games.
The girls, on the other hand, basically got the opposite. Even the list of sports open to them was short. Girls' sports had big "playing at recess" energy, while the boys' had "gonna win a championship" energy. Title IX changed that.
And conservatives hate it so much.
Scott Yenor of the Heritage Foundation, an ultraconservative organization that basically wrote the fascist blueprint Project 2025 for the Republican Party, called Title IX an “engine of feminist social engineering” in July of this year.
“The ultimate aim of feminist thinkers was a new kind of woman who would be more independent and even dominant and less deferential and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional female graces,” Yenor wrote.
It’s true. Sports has always been an evil plan to prevent women from becoming trad wives. These conservative folks believe that men should dominate women and that women should make babies and dinner and be quiet when a man is talking.
But it’s not all about sports. Title IX “also strengthened protections for students facing sex-based harassment and for pregnant and parenting students,” The Advocate reported.
In the world the Heritage Foundation wants to see, “sex-based harassment” is just harmless “locker room talk” and/or proof that women don’t have a sense of humor anymore and/or something women lie about to get men in trouble.
And there wouldn’t be pregnant or parenting students in that world. Pregnant students should have to drop out of school and either marry whoever impregnated them or go off to a home for unwed mothers to have the baby and give it up for adoption, hopefully to a Christian couple where the dad’s a youth pastor named Chaz.
Well, The Heritage Foundation is no doubt celebrating now that Donald Trump has formally removed a Biden-era rule that included LGBTQ+ people in Title IX’s protections. It’s not like Trump was ever enforcing it. For one thing, it had already been struck down in court. But formally stripping the language from the law was another avenue to tell Biden and LGBTQ+ people to go pound sand.
And tell students who get sexually assaulted to pound sand, too. Back in the first Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos bent Title IX to make it less helpful for victims of sexual assault. DeVos was much more concerned about the accused than the accusers. And that’s how it’s going to be going forward.
It’s important to notice that the very people who claim to be so concerned about girls’ and women’s sports are also the very people who oppose Title IX. I don’t know. Seems a little bit disingenuous.
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