On June 7, WHRC USA’s Lauren Levey gave a live testimony to the Department of Education in order to protect the Title IX sex-based rights of women and girls. You can listen to the testimony and/or read it below.
The Women’s Human Rights Campaign is a global nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting women’s sex-based rights. The Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights (which I’ll call The Declaration) was created to lobby nations to protect women and girls on the basis of sex rather than “gender” or “gender identity.” By sex we mean the biological differences between males and females.
My name is Lauren Levey. I’m testifying as a signatory of The Declaration, which has about 18,000 signatories.
Let’s be clear: When people talk about “transgender athletes”, what they mean is men and boys.
Title IX was enacted to protect girls from discrimination based on sex, not “gender identity.” Article 7 of The Declaration, consistent with Title IX, affirms women’s rights to participate actively in sports on a single-sex basis to ensure fairness and safety for women and girls.
I’d like to share three personal stories from signatories of the Declaration.
“I can’t imagine how much more negative my school experience would have been if we hadn’t had sex-segregated spaces and sports. The sexualized harassment from males was endless. You HAD to go along with it or risk ostracism. Sex-segregated spaces were a respite from the eyes, the comments, the touching. No female was spared because she presented a certain way. When I shaved off all my hair and wore my brother’s hand-me-downs, I still experienced sexual harassment.”
“My best friend in high school won several state high school championships in track. Because of Title IX, she earned 2 full scholarships!! If Title IX had been based on ‘gender identity’ rather than sex, she wouldn’t have been able to attend university.”
“If Title IX had been based on ‘gender identity’ rather than sex when I was growing up, there is absolutely no way my father would have allowed me to compete on the tennis and swim teams. It’s as simple as that.”
For girls to have an equal shot at education, abuse of girls by boys must bear consequences. And reports of abuse must be investigated seriously and not dismissed or discouraged or dealt with privately or otherwise covered up.
We Americans love sports, and we want them to be fair. A survey by MMA athlete Jake Shields with 5000 responses found 86% opposed men in women’s sports.
In a TMZ poll, out of 51,000 responses, 77 percent opposed men in women’s sports.
The 80% majority is not wrong. They’re not keeping an oppressed minority from having full civil rights out of blind hatred or fear. Men can participate in sports on the basis of their sex. Men are not women. And everybody knows that.
*Please note that the Women’s Human Rights Campaign USA (WHRC-USA) is now officially known as Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI-USA)
I support WHRC and protecting the rights of women and girls based on sex and not gender.
Title IX was explicitly made for girls and women. Trying to change it to accommodate trans identified males defeats the purpose of Title IX. We have seen the results of so-called inclusive policies, and they have been disastrous for girls and women!
Excellent work! Thank you for testifying to the Department of Education on behalf of all of the women and children in the world, your success will have a positive knock on effect to other countries who have fallen down this rabbit hole of chaos.
I don’t understand something:
I understand from what everybody says that title IX meant a guarantee that girls had the right to participate in sports instead of being discriminated against on the basis of sex.
Well, sports is divided up in male and female, so apparently that is not understood as “discrimination based on sex”, because dividing sports teams up like this is allowed.
So, what then IS the discrimination based on sex that title IX is about? It seems to be about the access of people to playing sports in general.
So now that gender ID is added, doesn’t it mean that title IX forbids keeping people from playing sports in general based on gender ID?
If so, then title IX in the new version does not say that boys who self-ID as girls can play on the girls team, it just says that they should be allowed to play sports in general, but not that it has to be the girls team, so there really is no problem.
What am I missing?
That is an astute question. The only thing I would add is that Title IX does not actually have a new version. It has a new interpretation by the Biden administration, but the wording has not been changed.
As for the rest, I agree. People are not excluded on the basis of “gender identity” if they are still allowed to play on the correct team for their sex. For example, no one claims that Canadian Olympic soccer player Quinn, who says that her “gender identity” means she is not a woman, is being excluded just because she is on the women’s team. Likewise, at a recent hearing for Pennsylvania SB 972, a girl whose track team had been forced to compete and share a locker room with a boy said that she and her teammates would gladly make a girl who self-IDs “as a boy or something else” (correctly noting that a large number of “gender identities” have become popular) feel welcome. In fact, she said that the boy had played on the boys’ cross-country team the year before; therefore, he had never been excluded from sports. None of the state bills that have been proposed to protect women’s and girls’ sports would prevent anyone from participating in sports.
The above simply is not the interpretation of the Biden administration. Again, by “interpretation,” I mean the administration’s interpretation of its own Department of Education’s re-definition of the word “sex,” which is, itself, not in keeping with Title IX as it is still written.