Celebrating Huge Wins to Preserve Title IX

With the Paris Summer Olympics a month away, all eyes are turning to our nation’s elite athletes. After a lifetime of training—spending countless hours alone on a track shave off fractions of a second—our athletes are out to prove they’re the best in the world.

Of course, for every athlete that makes Team USA, there are many, many men and women who are left out—some for good reasons; some for reasons that don’t quite make sense. One of the most publicized snubs is that of Caitlin Clark, a college basketball phenom now taking the WNBA by storm. Many feel it’s unfair for the selection committee to overlook the player who beat basketball legend Pete Maravich’s college basketball scoring record.

Not all news in the world of women’s sports is fraught with unfair omissions, though; in fact, one omission is a huge win for women’s sports. While Caitlin Clark was training to become an elite point guard, another NCAA athlete was claiming titles in women’s swimming—male swimmer Lia Thomas. In an attempt to take another roster spot from a well-deserving woman—this time in the Olympics—Thomas took legal action against World Aquatics when it excluded Thomas from the women’s competition. A court ruled in favor of the sporting body, keeping Thomas out of women’s competition at the Olympics.

Where Clark’s exclusion from Team USA is up for debate, there should be no question about Thomas being barred from taking the spot of a woman who trained hard to have a shot at a gold medal. This is not just a win for women’s sports; it’s a win for women all over. In addition to Thomas taking spots and championships from women, he also had access to the women’s locker room, much to the dismay of his teammates. One of the teammates, a survivor of sexual assault, describes how traumatizing it was to be forced to share a private space with a man “18 times a week.”

This, unfortunately, is a growing problem for women and girls across the country. Some states, like West Virginia, passed laws to protect the privacy and dignity of women. But in response, attorneys at the ACLU chose to push gender identity ideology rather than to protect safety and fairness for women by filing a lawsuit to strike down the law. As the case proceeded, a court ordered West Virginia schools to allow a male to join girls’ sports teams anyway.

Because of this, the male athlete was given access to girls’ locker rooms, where he made lewd remarks to the girls. One of these girls, Adaleia Cross, told her parents, who reported the issue to school administrators, but nothing changed. Alliance Defending Freedom, where I serve as legal counsel, now represents this young woman, along with many others, in lawsuits across the country. Adaleia took action to protect the definition of “sex” in Title IX to stay in line with scientific fact and common sense rather than subjective ideology.

In response to these unlawful changes, ADF has filed five lawsuits across the country. These legal challenges to the Biden administration have already yielded important wins for women’s dignity. Multiple courts have recently ruled against the administration’s illegal attempts to redefine “sex.”

A Louisiana court ruled to halt the illegal rewrite of Title IX in the states of Louisiana, Idaho, Mississippi, and Montana while the lawsuit continues. A few days after that, a Kentucky court added six more states under the safety umbrella as these lawsuits proceed.

Courts, athletic associations, and even medical experts are joining the chorus in favor of biological truth guiding how we serve women and girls in education and healthcare. As the Louisiana court wrote in its decision, “Enacting the changes in the Final Rule would subvert the original purpose of Title IX: protecting biological females from discrimination.”

There is still a long way to go in protecting the original meaning of Title IX, but we’re already seeing significant strides toward a welcome finish line. Women and girls deserve better than what our current administration is offering, and fortunately, our legal system appears to agree.

Rachel Rouleau is legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).