Transgender ideology will lose Biden the election

The culture critic Camille Paglia once said Barack Obama’s 2016 Title IX policy doomed Hillary Clinton. “There’s the election, right there,” Paglia remembered thinking. At the time, Paglia said Joe Biden would have succeeded where Clinton failed at the ballot box.

Yet in the middle of both an election year and a cultural reckoning, Biden’s Education Department is now reaffirming the Obama-era policy that reads gender identity into the definition of sex, forcing schools around the country to comply with dangerous and unpopular policies. In some cases, the new rule will spark high-profile legal battles sure to keep the topic in the news for months to come.

Biden’s policy says “instances where transgender students are subjected to a ‘hostile environment’ through bullying or harassment, or face unequal treatment and exclusion in programs or facilities based on their gender identity, could trigger an investigation by the [Education Department’s] Office for Civil Rights,” as the New York Times reported.

Officials, according to the Times, “stressed that while, writ large, exclusion based on gender identity violated Title IX, the new regulations did not extend to single-sex living facilities or sports teams.” Experts on both the Left and Right note that while Biden dodged the question directly, making explicit that sex includes gender identity will be a challenge for schools seeking to protect single-sex spaces and teams.

His administration is working on a separate rule intended to deal directly with that question, likely in an effort to dodge backlash while also mollifying transgender special interests. Those interests are rarely satisfied, though, even if the policy effectively achieves their desired outcome as it winds through the court system.

Nothing is ever enough, as Dr. Hilary Cass learned recently. No amount of data and research will change the minds of hardcore gender ideologues. The Cass report simply found what a growing chorus of Americans suspected: Our capacity for tolerance was preyed upon by radicals in academia, business, and media who foisted an experiment on children en masse.

The results of that experiment are even breaking through the legacy media’s protective shield. Last year, the Washington Post ran a headline that read, “Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows.” Just last week, The Hill published, “Majority of Americans oppose gender-affirming care for minors, trans women participating in sports.” The story reported on a new poll that found “A majority of adults surveyed in the poll, 57 percent, said a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, while 43 percent said it can be different from their sex assigned at birth.”

Paglia’s instincts were prescient on two levels, first that opening up Title IX protections to men would engender populist backlash and second that Joe Biden once had his finger more firmly on the pulse of American populism. Now, though, even as the media is forced to report on growing opposition, Biden’s party is staffed by people who’ve spent the better part of the last decade insisting any discomfort with the conflation of gender identity and sex is bigotry.

That’s not easy to walk back, even for the most cynical political operators. They risked more on the gambit than they realised.