Striking Down Biden’s Title IX Change Is Good For Free Speech and Due Process, Too

In striking down the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX, a federal court also provided a win for free speech and due process, in addition to protecting women’s sports.

While the changes to the rules that allowed men to enter women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms received much media attention, the Biden rules also gutted due process and free speech for students across the nation. Proponents of civil rights praised the latest ruling, including Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“As expected, courts have continued to find it impossible to justify the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX rules eviscerating students’ speech and due process rights,” Coward said in a statement provided to The Daily Wire. “With the 2020 rules now back in effect nationwide, schools will be required to restore procedures that respect the rights of all students.”

Title IX is a federal statute that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating based on sex. The statute initially applied to sports, but over the decades, has been expanded to allow schools to act as quasi-judicial systems over accusations of sexual assault and harassment.

Biden’s changes to the due process component of Title IX were particularly onerous, Coward explained further.

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“The Biden rules violated students’ due process rights in many ways, including by allowing for one person to serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury,” Coward said. “The regulations also eliminated students’ right to a live hearing to contest allegations and to cross-examine an accuser and witnesses through an advisor. When campus administrators investigate the most serious kinds of campus misconduct, they should use the time-tested tools that make finding the truth more likely. We don’t get closer to justice when those tools are not on the table.”

Catherine Lhamon, who leads the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and helped the Obama administration enforce an earlier anti-due process regime, called the recent rulings against her regulations “absurd.”

“We published the most comprehensive Title IX regulation since 1975 — I love it. I think it’s amazing,” Lhamon said Wednesday, according to POLITICO. “It has been enjoined in multiple lawsuits in multiple states across the country, in total, which is absurd. … I don’t think that augurs well for a set of courts who are eager to be fully responsive to the civil rights guarantees that we have long had.”

On Thursday, a federal court struck down the Biden administration’s new regulations, meaning schools across the country will have to follow the Trump administration’s rules, which provide due process for students accused of sexual assault, stronger protections for free speech, and continue to define “sex” as “male” or “female,” without including “gender identity.”