American Spectator Editor: What’s the Point of Title IX?

In a recent commentary, Melissa Clouthier, the managing editor of The American Spectator, asked, “Will girls need a new Title IX now that boys can be girls?”

Her commentary was spurred by the recent news report that an Alaska boy, who considers himself a girl, was allowed to compete as a girl against other girls in his state’s high school track championship. That he won wasn’t a big surprise to Clouthier.

“Men have some biological reasons for being physically superior to women,” she wrote. “Testosterone increases their muscle mass, lung capacity, and upper body strength. Then there are all the subtle ways that make a boy/man faster and stronger: smaller Q-angles, denser bones, more efficient oxygenation.”

Had the boy competed against other boys, not just at the state meet, but in local meets, he would lose, she added. Putting him up against girls, who have physiological disadvantages compared to a man, creates a “grossly unequal” playing field. And as our nation sees more situations like this, it “makes one wonder why have sex-specific sports designations,” she wrote.

“Title IX was created so that girls have an equal access to sports,” she wrote. “Title IX is specific about sex discrimination—not in how one identifies oneself, but in the genetic way a person is made.

“That is, sex is either male or female. A boy has XY chromosomes. A girl has XX chromosomes. Male and female. This has nothing to do with socialization and everything to do with biology. It is scientific and it’s factual. No matter the hormones, surgeries or emotional state, a person’s sex is unchangeable.”

The notion liberals and the Obama administration have advanced will mean girls will be deprived of opportunities Title IX was meant to protect. Rather than correct sex discrimination, she said, this new interpretation of the law will cause sex discrimination.

“It will be nonsense and girls will be back in the position they were in the 1960s when Title IX became necessary: competing behind boys who will receive the financial and opportunity resources while girls watch from the sidelines.”