Another Title IX backlash ascends
With Donald Trump re-elected to the presidency, it’s a deja-vu historical moment in which another Title IX backlash ascends to the oval office. Trump says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education, which enforces Title IX. He also says he will nominate former Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon to be his Secretary of Education. If her conservative politics match those of Trump’s previous Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, Title IX will be under assault in the coming years even if the Education Department survives.
McMahon, the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), comes with little experience in education and some significant ethical baggage, including a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband ignored years of sexual abuse of boys by a WWE employee. Advocacy organizations for women and sexual assault survivors decried Trump’s pick. The National Women’s Law Center called McMahon “another unqualified, dangerous sycophant.” End Rape on Campus said Trump’s choice of McMahon is a “dangerous move.” So far, Congressional Democrats are non-committal about McMahon but object strongly to Trump’s overall education agenda.
Over the past four years, the Biden Administration has made some progress in undoing the changes instituted during Trump’s first term. Under a multi-year process, Trump changed the Title IX regulations for the first time to make them more lenient toward students accused of sexual assault or harassment. Under the same multi-year process, Biden tightened accountability for sexual assault and harassment and clarified that Title IX protects against discrimination in education based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender. Trump vowed to undo these changes on “day one” of his second administration, but he can’t just wave a wand and make it so, as Education Week explained. It took four years for Trump initially to change the regulations, and four years for Biden to change them, so you can guess how long it might take for Trump to move the see-saw again.
Progress and backlash season the five-plus decades of the movement to eliminate sex discrimination in education under the law known as Title IX. Almost immediately after Congress passed Title IX in 1972, a major backlash arose from male athletic directors who didn’t want to share resources with women’s teams. Foes of fairness in Congress tried dozens of times to legislate Title IX away but women’s advocates beat the bills down one by one like a game of whack-a-mole.
Women made significant progress in the 1970s in almost all parts of education, not just sports. But the election of Ronald Reagan as president put anti-Title IX forces back in power. The 1980 Republican Party platform aimed to eliminate the Department of Education, and Reagan tried but didn’t succeed. Still, equity gains stalled throughout much of the 1980s.
Congressional action and court rulings reinvigorated Title IX and other civil rights laws in the 1990s. Momentum from the movement against sexual violence brought the problem more out in the open and led to stronger application of Title IX to stop sexual harassment and assault on campus in the 2010s. Which was followed by Trump’s backlash in 2016-2020, Biden’s response, and the newly elected Trump backlash.
Conservative victories in the 2024 elections include a recall of an important figure in Title IX history. In 1977, Pamela Price was a Yale University student and a plaintiff in the first lawsuit under Title IX concerning sexual harassment. The lawsuit failed but within a few years colleges started adopting sexual harassment policies and complaint procedures for the first time. Price became an attorney with some notable civil rights cases over the next few decades. In 2022 voters in Alameda County, Calif. elected her as the first African American woman to be District Attorney of the county.
Almost immediately, conservatives organized a recall campaign. They succeeded. In the video above, Price reviewed progress made under her leadership as D.A. in this 19-minute speech after the recall vote results were confirmed.
Elsewhere
Even under President Biden, the U.S. Office for Civil Rights has been failing to enforce Title IX, according to a report by the Blake Group. Among other failings, an estimated 92.7 percent of colleges were not complying with Title IX and they shortchanged women athletes $1.1 billion per year in athletic scholarships, according to the most recent data (from 2021-2022), the report said.
What happens on the federal level is only part of the Title IX story. As always, it often depends on students like these athletes at the University of Wisconsin to question whether their school is playing fairly, and demand action if they’re not.
There’s a new park dedicated to honoring Michigan women who’ve made a difference in Title IX history. “Title IX Plaza” is located in Dexter-Huron Metropark, in Dexter, a community northwest of Ann Arbor. Author Sara Fitzgerald posted more details on her blog.
I have five copies left of the Korean-language version of my book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination. If you’d like a copy, contact me through my website and I’ll send you one.
If you’re a podcast fan, check out this new one called Centering the Survivor, a joint project of End Rape on Campus and the Survivor Fund Hub.
