Rogers is the “data wrangler” at BillTrack50. He previously worked on policy in several government departments.
This month IssueVoter and BillTrack50 take a look at joint resolution that would disapprove of and disapply a rule from April 2024 that redefined the term “sex-based discrimination” to include sexual harassment, parental status or gender identity as it relates to Title IX regulations for educational programs receiving federal funding.
To understand the impact of this resolution, introduced by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), let's look at some of the background.
Title IX: A history
The term refers to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. It states: "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."
Title IX applies to schools, local and state educational agencies, and other institutions that receive federal financial assistance from the Department of Education. These recipients include approximately 17,600 local school districts, over 5,000 postsecondary institutions, charter schools, for-profit schools, libraries and museums. Also included are vocational rehabilitation agencies and education agencies of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.
While Title IX itself has remained constant, given its very broad brush wording there are accompanying rules that interpret what it actually means in different contexts, and those rules have been subject to changes and redefinitions over the years. Initially, Title IX was used to expand access to schools and colleges, and it required that support for female-dedicated athletics programs equal that of male-dedicated programs.
A major expansion of its remit began in 1992, when its protections were interpreted to cover sexual harassment and sexual assault. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Education issued guidance explaining that transgender students are protected from sex discrimination under Title IX, and should be treated consistent with their gender identity in academic life. The Trump administration later began rolling back these protections. In 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos withdrew the guidance on gender identity and in 2018 announced that Title IX did not allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their gender identities. In 2020, the Trump administration went further and contended that the rights of cisgender women athletes were infringed upon by transgender women.
The Biden administration attempted to reinstate protections for transgender students with the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation in January 2021 and the Executive Order on Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity in March 2021, though implementation was limited in a number of red states.
In April 2024 the Department of Education issued yet more guidance, called Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance. This is the rule the joint resolution seeks to disapply. The new rule, which took effect Aug. 1, represents a significant redefinition of Title IX. It clarifies that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It also makes changes to simplify how complaints are handled and has a new definition for sex-based harassment that includes a definition for hostile environment harassment.
The new rule ‘only hurts women and girls’
Proponents of H.J.Res 165 claim the rule redefines "sex" and takes away rights from women and girls. They focus on the possible implications of the reintroduction of gender identity and how that could impact sport and the safety of women and girls. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), in her own executive order, claims it is "a plainly ridiculous change that will lead to males unfairly competing in women’s sports; receiving access to women’s and girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and private spaces; and competing for women’s scholarships."
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) states, "It is a backward rule that only hurts women and girls, by stripping away opportunities and rights they have enjoyed for decades." They both argue that the new rule actually undermines Title IX and is part of a left-wing, radical gender ideology that ignores biological reality and will both remove female-only spaces such as locker rooms and bathrooms and also allow “biological males” to compete in women's sports. This is unfair, they say, and will leave women and girls vulnerable to all manner of threats.
The rule will restore and strengthen essential protections’
Opponents of the resolution claim that the new rule is essential to creating safe school environments for all by combating sex-based discrimination and harassment.
"After Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos took an axe to the Title IX rule and went out of their way to gut enforcement of protections for survivors of sexual assault, the Biden administration’s rule will restore and strengthen essential protections for survivors and make sure schools don’t get away with silencing students and sweeping sexual assault under the rug. At a time when we’re seeing an alarming rise in violence against transgender people, this rule explicitly clarifies that Title IX protects LGBTQ+ students and employees from unfair treatment and discrimination." Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, called on schools to implement the new rule now: "School administrators should take note and immediately act to implement anti-bias and anti-bullying and harassment programs that ensure misgendering stops, that cruelty against LGBTQ+ students ends and that every student has access to an education free of discrimination."
Robinson noted that numerous courts that have found discrimination on the basis of sex includes sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2020 the Supreme Court found in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination because of sexuality or gender identity. This has far-reaching implications for other areas of the law, and legal scholars have argued that this ruling also ensures similar protections for students through Title IX.
Will the resolution pass?
On July 11, H.J.Res 165 passed the House, 210-205, with the vote split exactly along party lines. It's likely to face a rocky road in the Senate and is unlikely to be called for debate. And President Joe Biden would be sure to veto it should it make its way to his desk. But the resolution is much more about setting battle lines for the upcoming election, with Republicans wanting to make transgender rights an issue as part of the ongoing culture wars.
It is certainly an emotive issue, as the recent furor over female boxer Imane Khelif in the Paris Olympics demonstrates. Khelif was disqualified from competing by the International Boxing Association in 2023 after she defeated the only Russian boxer in a competition, over claims she failed an unspecified gender test. She has called this a conspiracy, given the IBA president is a Russian and reportedly an acquaintance of Vladimir Putin.
The International Olympic Committee rejected the ban and allowed her to compete in Paris, which sparked a storm of false allegations and abuse regarding her gender, claiming that she was in fact transgender or intersex. Khelif was born a woman and has always competed as a woman and has been strongly defended by the IOC. Politicians around the world seized on the case, including ex-President Trump. “I will keep men out of women’s sports!” Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, in all caps.
Project 2025
Looking ahead, Title IX features prominently in the conservative Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a playbook for the next Trump presidency should he win in November. The document sets out that the Biden rule should be “reviewed,” including removing all the data-gathering requirements that help in monitoring such things as proportions of males and females engaging in different sports. It then recommends rolling back the rules to the Trump/DeVos era and redefining "sex" to mean biological sex at birth. It also seeks to “restore due process” for those accused of sexual misconduct by removing the changes that make it easier for complaints to be brought.
Regardless of the success of H.J.Res 165, political wrangling over gender identity isn't going away any time soon.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.