TWIBS: DoE Says CA Must Get Discriminatory in 10 Days or Else
Another moment in the unfolding saga of California vs. Trump, in which the Department of Education wrongly says California violated Title IX and must start discriminating against trans girls soon or face their wrath.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Yet another shot has been fired in the ongoing war between California and the Trump administration, as the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) declared on Wednesday that the California Department of Education and California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) have violated Title IX by allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports.
If you haven’t been keeping up with this saga, allow me to bring you up to speed: earlier this month, CIF (who oversee high school sports in the state of California) adjusted their rules for participation as Donald Trump began threatening to punish them for allowing transgender girls to compete in sports. The new rules allowed trans girls to compete, but stated that any cisgender girl who lost to a trans girl would be counted one place higher in the competition’s final results, tacitly invalidating trans competitors’. Despite this change, when trans teen and student-athlete AB Hernandez shared the podium with her supportive peers, Trump and his cronies had a full social media meltdown. Immediately afterwards, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta preemptively sued the government in an attempt to head off reprisal from Trump
The law that the Department of Education suggests California has violated, Title IX, is intended to protect student-athletes across America from discrimination on the basis of sex and gender. Title IX has long been used as a miserable political football between liberals and conservatives, but we should keep in mind that the DoE’s ruling here is flatly wrong. The current interpretation of Title IX is somewhat up in the air because of multiple attempts at revision and subsequent rollbacks, but ultimately it’s up to the courts to determine whether or not transgender students are protected from discrimination by that law, and the Ninth Circuit (whose jurisdiction includes the entire west coast) has already determined that they are.
Because the Executive Branch doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally interpret Title IX protections, it’s unlikely that any punitive measures they bring against the state of California will stick. The Trump administration already tried to leverage federal funding against Maine through the Department of Agriculture (because Governor Janet Mills publicly embarrassed Trump), and failed miserably in the attempt. It’s reasonable to assume that they’ll achieve similar results in their petty war with California over a handful of trans athletes, though it’s hard to say what the short-term collateral damage might be as these political institutions duke it out.
It’s worth noting that the OCR has had its own struggles lately. Layoffs in March to the tune of 55% of the OCR’s investigative force were rolled back on Tuesday because the reduction in manpower left the department virtually incapable of functioning, which has also delayed key statistics reports that the department was meant to release at the start of this month.
What we’re looking at here is obviously not the evenhanded, reasonable judgment of a federal department. This is a hollowed out, barely working office being puppeted by Trump and his ilk for the purpose of waging their ideologically motivated culture war, no matter how many innocent children they harm in the process. The OCR has given California 10 days to “change these unlawful practices … or risk imminent enforcement action, including referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for proceedings.” Considering the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has lost 70% of its manpower in the last few months, it’s unclear how effective any action on their part might be.
Regardless, let’s all congregate around our energy crystals and send California’s Attorney General’s Office as much healing power as we can, so that they may defeat these evil jerks in court as quickly as possible.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
