Idaho’s transgender athlete legislation, and its faulty reasoning
I heard a news report yesterday about Idaho’s latest court battle over transgender women and girls participating on women’s sports teams. The plaintiff is a transgender girl who wants to participate on her school’s track and field team; the defense is Idaho’s transgender sports ban.
The defense is backed by a Christian advocacy group called Alliance Defending Freedom. The group’s name is deeply ironic — defending freedom for specific people is probably more accurate. And I’ll presume that there’s some sense out there of how incredibly dehumanizing and bigoted this whole issue is.
But one specific part of Alliance Defending Freedom’s argument stood out to me as being highly problematic: Its legal counsel says that the Idaho law should be framed in the context of Title IX.
From a layman’s perspective, this might be right. Title IX is broadly known as the amendment that gave rise to women’s collegiate and high school sports. But there’s something awry with Alliance Defending Freedom’s using it to justify the transgender sports ban.
From late 2019 to through spring 2020, I was steeped in Title IX as part of an exhibit I was writing for a museum. Title IX is 37 words long, and it is part of the education amendments of 1972. Here it is:
