The Trump administration is creating a new special research team of the title IX focused on maintaining transgender women and girls of sports equipment and bathrooms designated for women.
The team “will protect students, and especially female athletes, from the pernicious effects of gender ideology on school programs and activities,” the education and justice departments said in a joint press release on Friday.
The team, according to the statement, will allow the two departments to rationalize the investigations on the “amazing volume of complaints of Title IX” that have been presented. Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational programs that receive federal funds.
The participation of transgender women in women’s sports has been an increasingly divisive political problem in recent years. More than half of the United States states now have measures that restrict the sports participation of trans students, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February that prohibits trans women and women from women’s sports.
The Special Research Team of Title IX will consist of researchers and lawyers of the DOE of the DOE and the Department of Justice.
“This collaboration effort with the Department of Education will allow our lawyers to take comprehensive measures when the sports or spaces of women are threatened and will use all the power of the law to remedy any violation of women’s civil rights,” said Attorney General PAM Bondi in the press release.
The Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, co -founder and former Executive Director of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), said he had a message for entities that allowed trans women “to compete in women’s sports and use women’s intimate facilities: there is a new sheriff in the city.”
A spokesman for the LGBTQ Glaad defense group called for the creation of the new team an “without foundation plan with the potential to waste incalculable taxpayers resources to pursue a deranged agenda of mood.”
“Aiming at a handful of athletes does nothing to protect women and girls,” added the spokesman. “In fact, these prohibitions endanger all girls, since they risk invasive genital exams and another ‘expensive verification’.”
Although the exact number of transgender students, during a December audience before Congress, the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, said he was aware of less than 10 active athletes of the NCAA that were identified as transgender.
In March, the Trump administration arrested $ 175 million in funds for the University of Pennsylvania about its transgender athlete policies, which the school said they met the Policies of the NCAA and Ivy League.