In the days since President Joe Biden’s administration published sweeping revisions to Title IX rules, much of the focus has been on how the updates are likely to impact female athletes — but that’s far from the only concern.
Critics quickly pointed out that those updates, which the Biden administration said were supposed to provide more protections for LGBTQ students, could be used to protect trans-identifying males competing on women’s sports teams.
But according to attorney Candice Jackson, who served as Acting Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education during the Trump administration, the rule changes could lead to further complications once applied in conjunction with policies that are already in place — specifically with regard to schools being “mandatory reporters” of suspected abuse.
“A disturbing corollary of Biden’s Title IX Rule: w/policies reflecting the Ed Dept’s position that refusing to treat someone ‘consistent w/gender identity’ damages mental health, schools will now HAVE TO consider reporting ‘non-affirming’ parents to Child Protective Services,” she said in a post to X.
Commenters made this objection to the draft rule; the Ed Dept’s disingenuous response was brushing it off by saying “Title IX doesn’t interfere w/ family life; schools don’t have to remedy harassment occurring outside school.” But schools are mandatory reporters per state laws.
— Candice Jackson (@CEJacksonLaw) May 3, 2024
“Commenters made this objection to the draft rule; the Ed Dept’s disingenuous response was brushing it off by saying ‘Title IX doesn’t interfere w/family life; schools don’t have to remedy harassment occurring outside school,’” she continued, adding, “But schools are mandatory reporters per state laws.”
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The upshot, according to Jackson’s reading of the new rules, is that the Biden administration views a failure to affirm a student’s gender identity as an action that could be damaging to that child’s mental health. Based on that interpretation, parents who are not proactive in affirming their children’s gender identities could be viewed as contributing to that damage.
And because educators are legally mandated to report any suspected abuse to Child Protective Services, they may have no choice but to report parents who refuse to help their children seek medical transition — or even those who object to schools that socially transition their children.
Biden’s Title IX rewrite comes on the heels of news that the state of Illinois was already planning to revise the definition of abuse to include a refusal to accommodate gender identity — a move that could empower the state, through Child Protective Services, to remove children from homes where parents did not affirm the new gender identity or help the children to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or even surgeries.
RELATED: More States File Flurry Of Lawsuits Against Biden Admin Over Transgender Title IX Rules
