Back at it again! Since this is a short one, I took some time at the end to reflect on what will be a lightning rod of an issue this year, both locally and nationally: the overruling of the Biden administration's changes to Title IX.

January 13 - Special Meeting (agenda)

This was the new council's orientation meeting, covering Robert's Rules of Order, common issues relating to the Open Meetings Act, and other procedural matters that the new (and, frankly, incumbent) councilors ought to know.

Councilors also attended ethics training on January 16.

January 15 - Regular Meeting (agenda)

Last week, a federal judge overturned the Biden administration's updates to Title IX, the policy which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex in school programs receiving federal funding. The changes sought to expand its applicability to trans students, requiring teachers and faculty to recognize students' gender identities, regardless of whether that identity was known or accepted by the student's parents, doctors, or other adult authorities.

Our local alt-right types have moved on from challenging young adult books featuring trans people to decrying the update to Title IX, imagining that the law would mandate schools to integrate everything from sports teams, locker rooms, and even overnight accommodations. The Title IX revision did not specify or mandate any of those.

It is so strange to me that the opponents to the inclusion of trans people in Title IX do so on the basis of gender and not sex. Let's take gender off the table entirely for a moment: if a student wants to identify differently than the sex they were assigned at birth, is this not within the direct purview of Title IX? Even if we all agree that Title IX is unconcerned with gender, it would be dishonest if we didn't recognize that the anti-trans advocates maintain a bizarre fixation with people's genitals, or how an OBGYN identified those genitals at birth.

Yet the conservative understanding of Title IX's application is entirely based on gender. Lori Wycall, at the last school committee meeting, said explicitly that she was glad that Title IX went "back to its original intent to protect women,” despite there being no gendered language in Title IX at all - no mention of women or females. The letter and the spirit of law sought to protect sexual minorities from exclusion in programs receiving federal money. If women (a gendered term!) constitute a sexual minority, then so do trans people.

This seems so self-evident to me. What am I missing here?

It's important to acknowledge here that these folks see any expansion of rights towards gender nonconforming people as an attack on their own rights; equating sex and gender is a fundamental component of TERF ideology. (I could write a whole essay about how white femininity is the scaffolding which upholds white supremacy.) Think about it: if a core component of your beliefs is family values, including complementarian separation of and distinction between the sexes, a trans person constitutes a threat to your understanding of the world. Paternalism depends on a gender binary, where women are X and men are Y - inherently, irrevocably.

But we do not live in a world where gender or sex fall into any kind of binary. As soon as you dig into the very real messiness regarding the interplay between sex and gender - that's outside of the scope of these reflections on Title IX - it's difficult to maintain an essentialist understanding of either.

I mention all of this because the local right-wing extremists are taking a victory lap right now, and I expect further antagonism toward and from the school committee this year as they work to untangle all of the work they had previously done toward implementing the Title IX change.

If you find these subjects interesting, here are some books I would recommend for further reading. With the exception of Dean Spade's, which is a little academic, all of these are super accessible to the average reader: