God Help Us: Biden to Allow Males in Girls Bathrooms on Day One
At the top of Joe Biden’s position page on gay and transgender issues is a quote from Biden that’s supposed to neatly express his guiding principle on the issues:
“Who do you love? Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages, at their root, are about.”
My guess is that the Biden campaign didn’t choose that epigraph from Biden because it was profound, eloquent, bold or revealing. It’s from May 6, 2012 — just days before then-President Obama announced what can charitably be called his “evolution” on the matter of same-sex marriage.
It’s platitudinal. If I told you the quote came from Joel Osteen or Woody Allen or Kim Kardashian, you’d have no reason not to believe me. Unless it’s slapped atop a page laying out a candidate’s positions on LGBT issues, it means nothing.
Rather, it’s there because it’s safe. No matter how you feel about Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage nationally, it’s not something that’s going to get you angry. It’s meant to tell you, the reader, that this is what Biden’s positions are all about: It’s just about love, and whom you love, and loving, and being loved, and did I mention love?
The problem is that what’s contained therein isn’t quite as voter-safe as that. Consider what will be one of Biden’s most controversial moves on day one of his presidency: Reinstating Obama-era Title IX guidance allowing students to use the bathroom or locker room they best feel fits with their gender identity.
“On his first day in office, Biden will reinstate the Obama-Biden guidance revoked by the Trump-Pence Administration, which will restore transgender students’ access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity,” Biden’s website states.
“He will direct his Department of Education to vigorously enforce and investigate violations of transgender students’ civil rights.”
He’s following through, too. Fox News reports that reinstating the guidance, revoked by the Trump administration in 2017, will be one of almost a dozen executive orders Biden plans to sign Wednesday.
The 2016 guidance was originally issued in the wake of North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill,” a law that mandated individuals must use bathrooms and other sex-segregated facilities based on their biological gender.
“Title IX’s implementing regulations permit a school to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, and athletic teams, as well as single-sex classes under certain circumstances,” read the original guidance, which was issued jointly by the departments of Justice and Education.
“When a school provides sex-segregated activities and facilities, transgender students must be allowed to participate in such activities and access such facilities consistent with their gender identity.”
“Gender identity” is defined broadly in the document, which says it “refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender. A person’s gender identity may be different from or the same as the person’s sex assigned at birth.”
“A school may provide separate facilities on the basis of sex, but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity,” the guidance states later.
“A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so. A school may, however, make individual-user options available to all students who voluntarily seek additional privacy.”
The letter is linked on Biden’s website, so one assumes it’ll be reinstated without significant alteration. It doesn’t necessarily have the force of law; the official terminology used was that the departments “have determined that this letter is significant guidance” [emphasis theirs] and that it “does not add requirements to applicable law, but provides information and examples to inform recipients about how the Departments evaluate whether covered entities are complying with their legal obligations.”
If you’re not complying with your Title IX legal obligations, however, it’s pretty clear what the ramifications are: “As a condition of receiving Federal funds, a school agrees that it will not exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat differently on the basis of sex any person in its educational programs or activities unless expressly authorized to do so under Title IX or its implementing regulations.”
However, Biden also has a similar agenda item that would very much have the power of law: Passing the Equality Act, which would make gender identity a protected class under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The text of the bill, much like the guidance issued by the Departments of Justice and Education under the Obama administration, doesn’t clearly define what “gender identity” is, however.
In May of 2020, Biden said that getting the legislation passed and signed “will be one of the top priorities I have” and a “first 100 days” agenda item:
Biden later adds Equality Act is a “first 100 days” item.
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) May 6, 2020
The one thing LGBT advocates fail to understand when they apply the “transphobe” label to anyone who opposes these bathroom measures is that opposition has nothing to do with an animus toward individuals who identify as transgender. Rather, it has to do with the potential for predators to take advantage of the fuzziness surrounding the concept of “gender identity.”
In Decatur, Georgia, the city school district settled a case with the Department of Education in June after the department found the school district didn’t appropriately investigate a sexual assault allegation made in 2017 in which a 5-year-old girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by a boy using the girls bathroom, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The school’s policy on bathrooms mirrors that found in the Obama administration’s guidance letter, even though the alleged assault came after it was rescinded.
Decaturish.com, a local news site in DeKalb County, Georgia, reported that while the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights couldn’t substantiate the sexual assault allegation and came to conflicting conclusions on whether the boy identified as transgender or “gender fluid,” it found “that due to the [school’s policy on transgender students], students are given leeway to select bathrooms of their choice, and there is evidence from [the boy’s] father that [his child] was using the girls’ bathroom, albeit for reasons unrelated to the policy.”
If the Equality Act is passed, the consequences would reach much further than schools. A Heritage Foundation white paper published in May noted the case of a biological man who claimed a female gender identity requested to enter a shelter for abused women.
“Since the women share bathroom facilities and sleep near each other, the shelter refused to admit him,” the Heritage Foundation paper stated.
“He later filed a complaint for ‘gender identity discrimination.’ The current administration has proposed a rule to protect shelters such as the Hope Center, which desire to respect the privacy of women in their care, but even that would also be reversed by LGBT activists’ proposals.”
Schools, shelters, gyms and other organizations need the ability to set rules to protect those they serve. This fact ought to be independent of how politicians feel regarding transgender issues. The fact that it isn’t shows how loudly the dogma of transgenderism lives within the modern Democratic Party.
“Who do you love? Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages, at their root, are about.”
This is a long way from that, Mr. Biden.
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