LGBT – Family Council

The Department of Education’s Title IX Regulations: Guest Column

Apr 24, 2024John StonestreetLGBTLGBT, Transgender

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Education released updated regulations for Title IX. The result is bad for parents, potentially harmful for children, and turns the protections for young women on their head.

Title IX is a section of the Civil Rights code, passed in 1972, designed to ensure equal access and protection for women in public education programs and activities. At the heart of Title IX is the legal recognition that, within public education, there shall be no discrimination “on the basis of sex.” This was designed to include athletic participation, facilities, and scholarships.

Each presidential administration, through relevant departments, issues clarifications on how to apply federal law. These interpretations end up as “rules” necessary for receiving federal dollars. The Biden administration’s new regulations for Title IX alter the definition of “sex discrimination” to the extent that women will no longer be guaranteed equality in education that Title IX was designed to ensure. Specifically, the new rule, which was over 1,500 pages, expands the category of “sex” to include “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “sex stereotypes,” and “sex characteristics.” At the same time, the rule fails to define what sex is at all or note biological sex as being essential to a category. In fact, the department has argued that “sex can encompass many traits and … it is not necessary for the regulations to define the term for all circumstances.”

The tragic irony is that it is impossible to know what legally counts as discrimination on the basis of sex if the concept of sex is not clearly defined. In an analysis by Ethics and Public Policy Center scholars Rachel Morrison and Eric Kniffin, without a clear definition of sex, such a rule can only be described as “arbitrary and capricious.” This is only complicated by the fact that the new rule also rolls back Trump-era rules that sought to raise the bar for accusations of sex discrimination, harassment, and abuse.

The department’s failure to clearly define sex reflects an intentional departure from “long-standing scientific understandings of the human person” and marks the latest advancement of gender ideology via politics into culture. This regulation seeks to legally normalize the increasingly contested idea of “gender identity” and reinforce so-called “gender-affirming care” and “transition” interventions, which have caused so much harm. Even worse, the rules strengthen the ability of schools to lead children down these dangerous paths without the responsibility of informing or securing consent from parents.

This new regulation also threatens to roll back the opportunities and protections of women and girls. Specifically, the rules designate that the very opportunities and protections designed for women can now be enjoyed by anyone who declares themselves to be a woman. As we’ve seen again and again, trans-identifying men who participate in women’s sports have an unfair advantage and violate women’s private spaces.

The new regulations make plain the significance of ideas and their consequences, especially when they take on force of the rule of law. It is also plain that elections do have consequences, and that there’s too much at stake now to sit out the political process. At this point, given the back and forth of the administrative state in such critical departments such as Education and Health and Human Services, Christians should stop thinking about voting as a choice between the lesser of two evils but instead, as a friend of mine says, as how to best lessen evil.

These regulations will increase evil. Far from being the policy for “everyone” that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona described, it prioritizes dangerous ideas over the wellbeing of children, the prerogative of the state over the rights of parents, and the wishes of trans-identifying men over the safety of women. Applying this new “guidance” will run contrary not only to the original intent of Title IX, but to the notion of human dignity in general.

U.K. Medical Report Shows Glaring Problems With Subjecting Children to Puberty Blockers, Hormones, and Sex-Change Surgeries

Apr 22, 2024Jerry CoxLGBTLGBT, SAFE Act, Transgender

Earlier this month Dr. Hilary Cass — a former president of the U.K.’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health — released her final report on how to improve National Health Services “gender identity services.”

In 2022 the NHS closed its Tavistock gender clinic after a government investigation revealed healthcare professionals had pressured families into subjecting their children to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones despite inadequate mental health screenings for children with gender dysphoria and an obvious lack of scientific evidence in favor of the “treatments.”

Now Dr. Cass’ 388-page report highlights glaring problems with giving children cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers and with subjecting children to sex-change surgeries.

A few of her key findings include:

There is no simple explanation for the sudden increase in the numbers of children and teens — especially adolescent girls — who identify as transgender.
There is a lack of reliable studies and evidence in favor of gender transition for children.
Giving cross-sex hormones to children “presents many unknowns.”
Doctors don’t know with any certainty if gender dysphoria in a child will continue into adulthood.
For most children and young adults, sex-change procedures are not the best way to manage gender dysphoria.

The British Medical Journal summarized Dr. Cass’s report by saying, ” Without doubt, the advocacy and clinical practice for medical treatment of gender dysphoria [through puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery] had moved ahead of the evidence—a recipe for harm.”

The U.K. has already closed its Tavistock gender clinic and taken steps to protect children from cross-sex hormones. Other countries — like Sweden and Finland — have taken similar actions.

While European countries work to protect children from sex-change procedures, the United States still lags behind. Gender clinics in America still encourage children with gender dysphoria to follow a three-step transition process:

Social transition, where a child is treated like a member of the opposite sex.
Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
Sex-change surgery.

These procedures can leave children sterilized and scarred for life, and doctors don’t know the long-term consequences they may have for children. That is why to date about half the states in the U.S. have passed laws protecting children from sex-change surgeries.

In 2021, lawmakers in Arkansas overwhelmingly passed the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act.

The SAFE Act is a good law that prevents doctors in Arkansas from performing sex-change surgeries on children or giving them puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Over the past three years, reports from Europe and elsewhere have shown time and again that Arkansas was right to pass the SAFE Act.

Unfortunately, the SAFE Act has been tied up in court since 2021, and a federal judge in Little Rock has blocked the state from enforcing the law. However, the case has been appealed to the Eighth Circuit.

We believe our courts ultimately will recognize that the SAFE Act is a good law and uphold it as constitutional.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Experimenting on Breastfeeding Babies: Guest Column

Apr 19, 2024John StonestreetLGBTLGBT, Transgender

A 50-year-old man who identifies as a woman was able to “breastfeed” his grandchild after taking a series of experimental hormones. The researchers who made this possible proudly announced that this unidentified man was able to have this “experience” without any detrimental side effects to himself, as if that’s what breastfeeding is about, the experience of the adult.

Not only has the FDA not approved these experimental drugs, it, in fact, strongly warns against them. Most medical professionals warn mothers against even taking cold medicine when breastfeeding and yet, somehow, proponents are praising this experimental use of these drugs as a step forward in “gender-affirming care.”

Maya Forstater, the executive director of Sex Matters, rightly criticized, “Men should not be permitted, still less supported, to get between babies and their mothers or to use babies as props to validate their beliefs that they are women.”

Children should never be social experiments to fulfill adult fantasies.