National Women’s History Museum features Title IX
I’ll be in conversation with Professor Eileen Tamura this Thursday, June 15 at 6 p.m. Eastern Time when the National Women’s History Museum features Title IX in a free online event. Register here to receive the Zoom link.
Professor Tamura, of the University of Hawaii, and I both were researching Title IX history in the past decade, working on our respective books, and we shared some interview transcripts with each other. Her new book, We Too! Gender Equity in Education and the Road to Title IX, goes into much more of the history (or herstory) leading up to Title IX’s conception and passage. This essential law against sex discrimination in education didn’t come out of nowhere. She describes the women’s movement and politics of the 1960s preceding Title IX.
Want to know what women’s place in U.S. society was like in the ’60s and ’70s? To give you a sense — Tamura’s book uses the words “caste” and “casteism” repeatedly, and for good reason. Check it out to understand what motivated the great feminist struggles of that era.
Her book then overlaps with my book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination for some of Title IX’s early years, and 37 Words includes the rest of its history up to the present.
Title IX’s 50th anniversary year comes to a close on June 23. But its story is as alive as ever. Join us for a fun conversation hosted by the National Women’s History Museum.
Elsewhere
The big Title IX news from the past month is that the Department of Education will not be issuing its final changes to the Title IX regulations or its new rules about transgender students’ participation in athletics until probably October 2023. Here is a brief recap:
When President Trump was in power, he and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did what no administration had done since Title IX became law 50 years ago — they changed the regulations governing how Title IX is applied and what schools are expected to do to comply with the law. It’s a laborious process to make those changes, but they did it anyway. Before that, each administration would issue guidance in the form of Dear Colleague letters and papers advising schools how they interpret the law and suggesting they follow that guidance. Trump made his vision mandatory.
When President Biden replaced Trump, he began the same laborious process to get rid of some of Trump’s mandates, which were highly criticized for, among other things, being too lenient on perpetrators of sexual violence and betraying their victims. The administration proposed its new rules in July 2022 and invited comments. Meanwhile, Biden’s administration also drafted Title IX rules on transgender athlete participation as Republican state legislatures began passing laws trying to ban transgender student athletes from sports. Comments on the draft athletics rules were accepted April 12-May 15, 2023.
A record 240,000 comments poured in about the July 2022 proposed regulations, almost twice as many as came in when Trump/DeVos proposed their changes to the rules. And the proposed athletics rules drew more than 150,000 comments. The Education Department is required to review and respond to all those before it can issue final rules. That, of course, takes time. Hence the delay in issuing new rules until October, much to the disappointment of advocates against sexual violence, who had hoped to have the revised rules in place before the fall semester starts.
From the Education Department’s website: “You can access the July 2022 NPRM here, view submitted comments here and find a fact sheet about the July 2022 NPRM here. You can access the Athletics NPRM here, view submitted comments here, and find a fact sheet about the Athletics NPRM here.” Happy reading.
What’s ahead
I’ve been working hard on a separate project for the past two months that is now complete. Whew! If you have Title IX questions or topics that you’d like me to address, send them through my Contact page to consider as I get back into the swing of blogging.
