Governor Greg Abbott instructed multiple public universities and colleges in Texas to ignore the Biden administration’s recent revision of Title IX, which will soon prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation in federally funded educational institutions.
Abbott penned the higher-education letter on Wednesday, more than a week after he informed the White House that Texas would not comply with the expanded Title IX when it goes into effect on August 1. Abbott told the following schools to do the same: Texas A&M University, Texas Southern University, Texas State University, Texas Tech University, Texas Women’s University, University of Houston, University of North Texas, University of Texas, and the state’s community colleges.
“The law passed by Congress was based on the fundamental premise that there are only two sexes — male and female,” the Republican governor wrote to the chairmen and regents of those schools. “President Biden wants to force every school across the country to treat boys and men as if they were girls and women and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity, exceeding his authority as President in order to impose a leftist belief on the next generation.”
The letter marks the latest example of Texas’s opposition to the U.S. Department of Education’s updated civil-rights policies, which will include added protections for LGBTQ+ and pregnant students and employees. Last week, Abbott also directed the Texas Education Agency to ignore the modified rules after they were announced.
In conjunction with Abbott’s order, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed a federal lawsuit to block the Biden administration’s Title IX rewrite. At least 20 other Republican-led states have since sued the Department of Education and its top officials over the same issue.
Since its inception in 1972, Title IX has protected female students from sex-based discrimination. The new rules, however, extend those protections to individuals based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in educational settings that receive federal funding, according to a Department of Education fact sheet. If schools are found in violation of the 1972 law’s revision, they can lose federal funding.
The revision will also roll back a Trump-era policy that required live hearings and cross-examinations, in which students accused of sexual assault could question their accusers. Under the new rules, the live hearings will be optional and preclude “unclear or harassing” questions from being asked.
In the Wednesday letter, Abbott touted his own record in signing laws that ensure due process for all parties in cases involving sexual assault and sexual harassment and protect women’s collegiate sports from transgender-identifying men. The forthcoming Title IX regulations notably do not encompass transgender athletes.