Biden’s Title IX guidance would force schools to choose between indoctrinating or feeding students

The Biden administration’s new Title IX guidance, released last month, is a radical and almost certainly unconstitutional distortion of the original statute — one that threatens free speech, due process, women’s rights, and even parental rights. It even threatens schools’ ability to provide for and feed students in need.

The updated guidance changes the definition of “sex” to include “gender” and “gender identity” and expands the definition of “sex-based harassment” to include any action that prevents a student from participating in an education program or activity “consistent with their gender identity.” This means that government-funded schools and universities will have no choice but to allow boys who identify as girls into girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and dormitories, teachers will be forced to use preferred pronouns, and fellow students will be expected to accommodate their gender-confused peers’ demands or risk being accused of creating a “hostile environment” within the school.

If a school refuses to abide by these new expectations, the Biden administration has made sure that it will suffer serious consequences. In May, for example, the Department of Agriculture announced that it will apply President Joe Biden’s new Title IX guidance to its National School Lunch Program, which provides funding to schools so they can provide free lunches for low-income students. The USDA instructed that all state agencies and Food and Nutrition Act program operators must “expeditiously review their program discrimination complaint procedures and make any changes necessary to ensure complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation are processed and evaluated as complaints of discrimination on the basis of sex.”

In other words, if a school refuses to allow boys to compete on its female sports teams or prevents a male from using the female locker room, it could be found in violation of the Education and Agriculture departments’ new standards and could have its school lunch funding pulled as a result.

This ultimatum is absurd on its face, not least because it punishes low-income children who have no control over school policy.

Take, for example, Grant Park Christian Academy, a school in Florida that for years has served primarily low-income, minority students, in part because of funding from the National School Lunch Program. Every single one of the 56 students enrolled at Grant Park this fall semester comes from a family below the federal poverty level. But because of the Biden administration’s new rules, the school might not be able to care and provide for them the way it has in the past. Grant Park is being forced either to accept a sweeping and radical redefinition of sex, one that violates the school’s religious beliefs and puts at risk the safety and privacy of its female students, or lose the ability to feed its students altogether.

Make no mistake: The Biden administration is playing games with students’ well-being. Children need to eat, and their ability to do so should not be dependent on the federal government’s political agenda. But the Biden administration has proved time and time again that it will stop at nothing to force its radical gender ideology onto everyone, public and private schools, students and parents, and everyone in between — no matter the cost.