Casting Evidence Aside | City Journal

In its recent Title IX guidance, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights redefines the 1972 law to ban discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” in federally funded education programs. In doing so, it showed willful disregard for scientific research on pediatric gender transition and for the findings of the Cass Review, a 388-page report and the most comprehensive to date on youth gender medicine.

OCR also ignored legal precedent. It said that its Title IX rule was a response to Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 Supreme Court decision that involved employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. OCR thus acted without regard for the vast differences between employment (which involves adults) and education (which involves primarily children). And it disregarded entirely the Bostock Court’s explicit statement that it was “proceed[ing] on the assumption that ‘sex’ . . . refer[s] only to biological distinctions between male and female” and consequently that its ruling does “not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.”

The Republican response has been swift. Several red states have publicly condemned the update, and more than 20 have filed lawsuits. Much of the criticism has rightly focused on how creating “gender identity” rules will undermine women’s safety and opportunities by eliminating single-sex spaces and forcing the integration of male athletes into female sports.

The new rule effectively forces schools to facilitate so-called social transitions—recognizing trans-identifying students by their chosen “gender”—regardless of students’ age, familial circumstances, or medical and mental-health background. Schools won’t need to get parental consent; in fact, the rule effectively compels them to secure students’ consent before disclosing information about their social transition to their parents. It does so by recognizing students’ right to privacy from not just their school, but their own parents.

These new changes bring the Department of Education into conflict with the findings and recommendations of the recently published Cass Review. Immediately following the Review’s publication, Kamran Abbasi, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, acknowledged that the evidence base for gender medicine—“from social transition to hormone treatment”—is “threadbare.” He called the report “an opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and place evidence informed care at the heart of gender medicine.”

The Biden administration has declined that opportunity. Its new Title IX rules implicitly reject the report’s findings and further illustrate Democrats’ indifference to the rising chorus of international skepticism about pediatric gender medicine and early social transition.

via www.city-journal.org

Leor Sapir, Joseph Figliolia