The Title IX Fight Isn’t Just About Sports. It’s About Civil Rights.

Across the country — including at the U.S. Supreme Court — courts are being asked whether Title IX protections extend to transgender students. And with those cases, a dangerous lie is being repeated: that Title IX requires schools to exclude trans women and girls in order to “protect” girls’ sports. That’s false. Legally, historically, and constitutionally.

But more importantly, this lie reveals the far-right’s true agenda: dismantling our longstanding civil rights protections.

Extremists are attempting to rewrite Title IX by redefining “sex” in ways that narrow who counts, who qualifies for protection, and who belongs.

This legal strategy is part of a broader political project to control gender, bodies, and belonging—a project rooted in the ideology of White Christian Nationalism. It’s about re-entrenching rigid gender roles and elevating one extreme religious worldview above all others.

Title IX: An Anti-Discrimination Law, Not an Exclusion Law

Title IX was passed in 1972 to prevent sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. It protects:

• equal access to all academic and extracurricular programs (including sports)
• freedom from sexual harassment and gender-based violence
• opportunities in STEM and other historically exclusionary fields
• fair and nondiscriminatory disciplinary processes
• the rights of pregnant and parenting students
• students targeted based on sex stereotypes

Title IX has never required schools to exclude transgender students. In fact, it’s the opposite: it has long protected trans inclusion. Courts and federal agencies across multiple presidential administrations have agreed that discrimination against transgender students is discrimination “on the basis of sex.”

Title IX Sports Regulations Are About Access To Resources, Not Discrimination

Title IX has sports-specific regulations. These regulations allow, but do not require, schools to offer sex-segregated sports.These regulations even outline scenarios where schools that do segregate sports must allow cisgender boys to participate in girls’ sports. None of these regulations require schools to discriminate against transgender girls. Rather, they require schools to offer boys and girls equal access to sport-related opportunities and resources.

By Including Trans Students, Minnesota Is Following The Law

Minnesota’s current approach — to treat transgender students according to their gender identity — is exactly what Title IX, the U.S. Constitution, and the Minnesota Human Rights Act require.

Both federal and state courts have affirmed that:

• Discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination.
• Schools must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.
• Bans that prevent students from participating according to their gender identity violate Equal Protection under the U.S. Constitution.

This Is White Christian Nationalism at Work

What Trump and his allies are proposing is not rooted in law, it’s rooted in far-right ideology. Their push to reinterpret Title IX is part of a broader White Christian Nationalist agenda. That agenda seeks to:

• Fix gender as a state-enforced category
• Gut civil rights protections
• Use public institutions to enforce far-right gender norms
• Push LGBTQ+ people, women, and gender-diverse families out of public life

Trans youth are being targeted first because they are politically vulnerable. They can’t vote. They don’t hold institutional power. And misinformation about them is widespread.

But trans kids are only the beginning.

What’s At Stake

If this effort to redefine “sex” under Title IX succeeds, the harm will begin with trans people, but it will not end there.

For trans students, the consequences are immediate and devastating: exclusion from school life, increased harassment, and the message that they don’t belong. When the government declares an entire group unworthy of protection, it changes how schools treat them, how their peers see them, and whether they can safely participate in public life.

But redefining “sex” doesn’t just strip protections from trans people, it reopens the door to all the forms of sex discrimination Title IX was originally created to stop.

Title IX works because it recognizes that discrimination based on sex often shows up through stereotypes: how women’s bodies should look, how women should behave, and who is seen as credible or deserving of protection. Narrowing “sex” to a rigid, state‑enforced definition empowers the government to police those boundaries, and that puts all of us at risk.

For example: gender‑nonconforming girls, women with naturally higher testosterone, women who are tall, muscular, disabled, or who don’t fit white, feminine norms would become vulnerable to scrutiny and exclusion. Cisgender women of color — who are disproportionately stereotyped as “too masculine” or “too aggressive” — are especially at risk.

This Is Bigger Than Sports. This is About Our Civil Rights. And It’s Time to Stand Up.

Title IX was designed to ensure equal opportunity, full participation, and protection from discrimination. But now it’s being twisted into a tool for exclusion.

This fight isn’t just about student athletes or school policies. It’s about whether trans people are allowed to exist safely and freely — and whether we can count on our civil rights to mean what they say. Because what’s taken from trans people today can be taken from all of us tomorrow.