The Trump administration has declared June to be “Title IX Month,” and says it will celebrate “with actions to protect women in line with the true purpose of’ the landmark legislation that opened athletics and academia to girls and young women.
Hallelujah!
This means the Trump administration will finally crack down on all of those schools that, a half-century on, are still shorting their female athletes of both resources and facilities, right? It’s going to work with Congress to enact meaningful reform so the Center for SafeSport does, indeed, make sport safe from predatory coaches and support staff? Restore funding to the Department of Education so it can conduct robust Title IX investigations? Insist the NCAA ensures that women athletes aren’t being left behind by NIL and whatever the new structure of college sports looks like?
Oh, my bad.
The administration’s interest in Title IX is solely to use it as yet another cudgel to bully and erase transgender women. To promote fearmongering and hate over fewer than 10 NCAA athletes and 100 or so participating in youth and college sports.
This obsession over the genitalia of the teeniest, tiniest fraction of the population is, quite frankly, weird. Yet the right-wing has perpetuated the idea that transgender women are a threat to our very existence, and the Trump administration, never missing an opportunity to rile up its base, has run with it.
According to this White House, transgender people are so big and so strong they’re a marauding horde about to overrun the playing fields and podiums. They’re also supposed to be too weak to fight in the military, but never mind that contradiction! Keep your eyes focused on this “threat.”
Except transgender women are not, and never have been, the real danger facing women and women’s sports. Or women in larger society, for that matter.
When Title IX was passed 53 years ago this month, it was meant to lift the artificial constraints holding women back. And it has. Women now make up more than half the population in higher education, and the idea of telling a woman she can’t go to law school or med school because she would take a spot away from a man is now seen as, rightly, laughable.
The WNBA and NWSL are thriving, and U.S. women won the medal count at last summer’s Paris Olympics — just as they did in Beijing, Tokyo, Pyeongchang and Rio. Ratings and attendance for NCAA basketball, volleyball and softball are skyrocketing.
But there are still so many areas where women lag behind. Areas where an administration that was sincere about equity could make a difference.
A USA TODAY review in 2022 found that, for every $1 schools spent on travel, equipment and recruiting for their men’s teams, they spent 71 cents for their comparable women’s squads.
In just a two-year period, that added up to $125 million more spent on men than women in basketball, baseball and softball, golf, soccer, swimming and diving, and tennis.
Yet the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has never — not once — withdrawn federal funding from a school for these end-arounds of Title IX. And given the gutting of the Department of Ed under Trump, that’s not likely to change! I doubt Education Secretary Linda McMahon will even be asked about it when she appears Wednesday before the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce.
The NCAA has been crying to Congress and the White House for protection from the financial dumpster fire it created and fueled. A system that is increasingly funneling more money to male athletes and putting women’s teams in jeopardy.
You can find at least one story a day of a coach being arrested or convicted of abusing a young athlete. They might not get the attention of Larry Nassar’s hideous crimes, but one case of abuse of a child is one case too many. Yet Congress has slow-walked SafeSport reforms and done little to address its continuing funding issues.
But go on about the tens of transgender athletes in youth and college sports.
The work to level the playing field begun by Title IX is not complete; the Trump administration is right about that. It would rather throw bombs and sow division than do it, though, and that is nothing to celebrate.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.