Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the Biden administration’s finalized rule to rewrite Title IX is “extreme,” noting how the administration’s determination to rewrite anti-discrimination rules to encompass gender identity issues appears to be one of its “highest priorities.”
On Tuesday, Skrmetti led six states in suing the Biden administration’s Department of Education on Tuesday over its finalized rule to rewrite Title IX to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation.
Title IX currently 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.
The Biden administration’s finalized rule, if allowed to stand, abolishes sex-based distinctions in educational activities and programs to accommodate transgender individuals.
Skrmetti, in an exclusive interview on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, said the “net effect” of the administration’s rewrite of Title IX is “at its most extreme.”
“Title IX is the federal law that protects women from discrimination in education…It says that you cannot discriminate on the basis of sex in education. It’s an important law. It’s been incredibly influential on American society – protected women, given them opportunities, promoted our economy to an incredible degree – and for ever and ever, everybody understood that it referred to sex, the sex binary, men and women. There’s language throughout the statute that talks about one sex, both sexes – makes it clear they’re talking about men and women. The rules that cover this have, for most of the history of this, not even contemplated a deviation from that,” Skrmetti explained.
“It’s about sex discrimination. It’s about men and women. Now, we have a rule propounded by the Biden administration saying that the sex discrimination prohibition in Title IX encompasses gender identity and sexual orientation as well. So rather than just focus on men and women, it looks at men who identify as women, women who identify as men, and it creates new protections outside the scope of what the statute authorizes – meaning Congress passed a law and now the administration is trying to rewrite it. The net effect of this rewrite is at its most extreme,” the attorney general added.
“If a man wanders into a women’s locker room, not only can people not question why that man is in there for fear of misgendering and creating a discriminatory situation, if a woman complains that she is uncomfortable about it, she can be punished for violating the civil rights of the man in the locker room,” Skrmetti continued.
He said while he recognizes that gender identity is a “difficult topic” as “there are people who are having a really hard time in their lives” with the concept, the attorney general said he believes the unlawful rewrite of Title IX “fundamentally rewrites the laws of society – not just the statute, but the way we’ve understood sex going back thousands of years.”
“There are fundamental and enduring differences between the sexes. The law recognizes that,” Skrmetti said.
Regarding the Biden administration’s determination to rewrite anti-discrimination rules to encompass gender identity issues, Skrmetti noted that Title IX’s rewrite was not only intentional but “appears to be one of the highest priorities of the administration.”
“On day one of the administration, there was an executive order that said that every agency should rewrite their anti-discrimination rules to encompass gender identity issues. So this is not just something that they intended to do. This appears to be one of the highest priorities of the administration. The problem is, in America, the people’s elected representatives make the law. The agency bureaucrats have no power to rewrite what Congress has done, and that’s exactly what’s happening here,” Skrmetti said.
Skrmetti’s lawsuit – joined by the states of West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia – was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee applauded Skrmetti for filing the lawsuit on Tuesday, saying, “Tennessee will always protect women and children from federal overreach.”
“Our state has consistently pushed back on the Biden administration’s damaging federal policies that stand in opposition to years of progress made under Title IX, and we will continue to do so,” Lee added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
