For the last several years, a wave of Republican-led state legislatures have passed bans on transgender athletes participating in school sports teams that align with their gender indentity, including high school and college. Until now, Democrats were surprisingly united against these restrictions — but the Biden administration has apparently decided that maybe some of these anti-trans activists have a good point.
Under a new rule that the Education Department proposed Thursday, schools that receive federal funding wouldn’t be able to institute blanket bans on trans people — especially trans girls and women — participating in sports. But schools would be able to choose which sports get to ban trans kids from playing on certain teams. The administration is framing it as a compromise that allows for “flexibility.” It sounds to me more like an attempt to play to the center at the expense of trans rights.
It sounds to me more like an attempt to play to the center at the expense of trans rights.
As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted, the new rule is a sharp reversal from when President Joe Biden took office. On the first day of his term, he signed an executive order that declared that children “should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” And an Education Department policy directive issued in June 2021 promised the administration would take action if students are denied equal chances to take part in “academic or extracurricular opportunities.”
What changed between now and then? This rule has been in the works for a long time, but the only major shift inside the administration has been the elevation of White House chief of staff Jeff Zients. Unlike his predecessor, Ron Klain, Zients is a known centrist whose accession in early February has coincided with a rightward turn from Biden.
In the last two months, we’ve seen Biden make U-turns on a number of issues and…
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