(Here’s a link to the petition mentioned in the title.)

In their historical context, laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex had the more-specific target of prohibiting discrimination against women.  The perverse use of such laws to permit male athletes, identifying as “transgender women,” onto the field with female athletes always required a legal sleight of hand.

Politically, the trick was to fabricate a legal basis for the change that avoided messy public approval and due process.  The Obama administration’s Department of Education began re-interpreting the law in 2010, with carefully worded “guidance” specifying that sexual harassment can happen “regardless of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the harasser or target.”  The letter acknowledges that “Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation,” but using a possibly hypothetical example, the letter stretches the law to cover harassment of a gay student because it “was based in part on the student’s failure to act as some of his peers believed a boy should act.”

Two observations about this guidance are important to keep in mind.  First, the context, here, is punishing “harassment and bullying,” which is at least two steps removed from questions about the facilities or programming a school offers to transgender students.  Second, an earlier stage in this government-driven cultural transformation (which seems increasingly deliberate in its roll-out) was the insistence that government policies shouldn’t simply address bullying and harassment, but must segment people into groups including those you can bully and harass and those you can’t.

Another letter, published in April 2011, focused on sexual violence (think rape on college campuses), calling it “a form of sex discrimination.”  Of itself, the letter has little to do with transgender policies.  However, in addition to giving discrimination the weighty feel of “violence,” the letter placed a legal obligation on the school to respond to complaints about such violence.  It also suggested that “schools should take proactive measures to prevent sexual harassment and violence.”

More significant for transgender policy, however, is the fact that this “guidance” set up the Obama administration for the next turn of its policy ratchet.  In April 2024 — having allowed some time to pass so the details of the earlier “guidance” might become fuzzy in the American memory — the federal Department of Education issued a questions and answers document related to the 2011 guidance, and tucked into question B-2 (the eighth question) is an assertion of cultural and definitional change answering the question, “How should a school handle sexual violence complaints in which the complainant and the alleged perpetrator are members of the same sex?”

Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity and [the Office of Civil Rights] accepts such complaints for investigation.

This is the pivotal text included in the Rhode Island Department of Education’s own “guidance” to Ocean State schools in 2016.  Since we’re tracing the dishonest way in which radical activists in government made this policy law without due process, an editorial error in RIDE’s document appears more sinister.  It seems like simple bureaucratic sloppiness (indeed, I recall coming to that conclusion when I wrote about the guidance at the time), but RIDE presents the quotation from the Q&A as if it comes from the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter.  Even more, the document “accidentally” links to an unrelated letter from 2014 concerning disability discrimination.

The dishonesty continues as RIDE attempts to find authority for its radical policy in state law.  The “guidance” references a Constitutional provision forbidding discrimination “solely by reason of race, gender or handicap.”  It cites a state statute that includes “gender identity” among the categories that cannot be used to deny somebody service.  And it cites a state statute forbidding “discrimination because of sex” in schools.  Notably, this statute specifically allows schools to have separate bathrooms and teams for “males and females.”

In summary, state and federal law acknowledge the reality that there are two sexes, male and female.  In recent decades, protections have been extended to people who self-identify as the other sex, but when passed, those laws and policies were understood to be limited by the fact that there are, indeed, only two sexes.  To change that definition, the Obama administration rolled out a sequence of “dear colleague letters” — which cannot contradict or create law, but only offer “guidance” about how an agency interprets the law, subject to appeals to the judiciary — followed by a Q&A sheet that claims to finally eliminate the biological distinction between men and women.

The radicals who manage Rhode Island’s failing education system took that opportunity to redefine the definition of “sex” in the state, as if they had no choice because of federal law.  However, the Trump administration rescinded all of the federal “guidance” in 2017.  Indeed, some of the documents to which RIDE refers are clearly marked as rescinded.

RIDE went even farther into objectionable changes of the law, though.  As I pointed out in 2016, RIDE didn’t only pressure school districts to pretend boys and girls could change their sex by definition, it opened the door for schools to lie to parents about what was going on with their children’s fundamental sense of identity during the school day.  The assault on our rights and sovereignty as American citizens is astonishing.  (And one can’t help but wonder how much taxpayer money was used, through USAID or otherwise, in the development and execution of this strategy over decades.)

Such an assault makes three actions imperative.  First, as a minimal step that can be done right now, pressure the state to reverse course by signing the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s petition to the state Interscholastic League to repeal its policy of allowing biological boys to compete in girls sports.  Second, become active or at least vote to replace Rhode Island politicians who deny biology and accept the deliberate violation of our right to self governance.  And third, get your own children out of public schools, where you can only assume ideologues are continuing their schemes against your family.