The New Title IX Rules Delayed AGAIN Until Maybe March 2024 per OMB's Announcement
The Biden Administration had promised to issue new rules for schools to know what adherence to Title IX means or consists of. These rules have yet again been delayed so that if we are lucky they will come out during March, 2024. The new rules should address two disparate and yet very important issues currently causing doubt in the Title IX world: First, does Title IX apply to trans and other such issues, and second, does Title IX need to provide procedural safeguards under due process.
The OMB’s announcement for the New Rules release date is here https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202310&RIN=1870-AA16
We commented on these proposed rules back on September 12, 2022, as you can see here:
We remain concerned and always with our focus on Title IX and the student discipline environment being highly impacted not by its goals, with which we agree, but with the nature, background, and motives of those who implement Title IX adherent policies--that is the many school administrators whose jobs depend on and stem from a certain Title IX yearly compliance rate.
Seen that way, several of the fundamental paradoxes of Title IX have always seemed easy to explain, for example:
1. On the one hand who in their right mind is going to say that any form of sexual assault (and here “any form” is limited to knowingly non-consensual) is part of a good educational environment.
No one. Yet read the press and you think that anyone responding to sexual misconduct is a guilty non-human bereft of human rights.
2. On the other hand, who in their right mind is actually going to say that enforcement rates and conviction rates of males responding to charges of sexual misconduct violations does not disproportionately affect men of color, athletes, first generation college male students, DACA immigrants, and those on the spectrum?
No one. Yet again, look at the statistics. This is what Kimberle Crenshaw originally meant when she coined the term “intersectionality”. See, e.g, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039 and everything that has followed proving her right.
3. On the third hand, who in their right mind would say that Title IX does not cover, for example, issues and experiences related to sexual identity?
No one. I mean that is like saying that the US military should not have an air force because whatever militia existed at the time of the authorization of this army did not include, or even suspect about the possibility, of air flights.
4. And finally, who in their right mind would not say that the Title IX rules need to be vigorous and clear particularly so that schools enforce them--and their required panoply of protections--as opposed to just sweeping complaints under the rug, or channeling responses to these complaints onto different mechanisms?
Again, no one.
So the new rules are welcome and eagerly awaited so long as they strengthen the system for everyone--not just for the administrators. And as usual, if you are reading this note because you have received a notice of allegations from your school, consult a lawyer, right now.