The Supreme Court has called a red card on California — and the state can’t afford to ignore it.
Last month’s Supreme Court decision in the West Virginia v. B.P.J. case should put education leaders in California on notice.
The court upheld bans in 27 states against biological males participating in females’ sports.
Though the decision stopped short of completely banning the practice nationwide, states like California will be unable to continue their current transgender sports policies.
The reason is simple: The federal government has already begun to take action against California under civil rights law.
For example, the US Department of Education (DOE) Office of Civil Rights concluded its investigation into San Jose State (SJSU) earlier this year, and found the school to be in violation of Title IX because it allowed a biological male to play on the university’s women’s volleyball team.
In response, San Jose State and the entire California State University (CSU) system preemptively sued the DOE in an attempt to prevent it from enforcing its findings.
The problem that SJSU and the CSU system now have is that the Supreme Court confirmed that the term “sex” in Title IX “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.”
The court’s liberal justices dissented, but on that point, merely argued that the majority was too strident in its definition, and should have recognized that the standard definition of “sex” was an “assumption.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went a step further, referring to biological sex as “sex assigned at birth.”
Regardless, any claim that SJSU was in compliance with respect to Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination just went out the window, even if the CSU system may still be trying claim that it was in compliance.
The Supreme Court decision means that the federal government can now threaten the federal funding of any college or university that allows biological males to play on girls’ or women’s teams, even in the 23 states that have not banned the practice themselves.
As if that’s not enough, the DOJ and the US Department of Justice have opened subsequent Title IX investigations into multiple California colleges, as well as local school districts.
One such investigation involves three women’s volleyball players who attend Santa Rosa Junior College and who filed a Title IX complaint after they lost their starting spots, and later, their roster spots, after they protested the fact that a biological male had been allowed to play on the women’s volleyball team.
They also filed a Title IX complaint against the California Community College Athletic Association (3C2A), which is the athletics governing body for almost all of the state’s community colleges. Each of the 113 community colleges in 3C2A is now at serious risk of losing its federal funding, which will make the mandate difficult to ignore.
In addition, Jurupa Valley Unified School District is under investigation after allowing biological male AB Hernandez to play on the girls’ volleyball and track teams.
The Supreme Court ruling should also end the ridiculous policy instituted by the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), which requires girls to share a podium with a biological male, as happened in the AB Hernandez case.
It’s unclear what California schools might do to try to allow transgender athletes to continue participating in sports.
There may be an intriguing compromise, as proposed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his majority opinion. He seemed to suggest that schools could create coed teams that allow all students to have the opportunity to play.
That might present budgetary challenges, among others, but adding a coed category in addition to the current men’s/boys’ and women’s/girls’ categories could allow transgender student-athletes to compete in sports on a level playing field.
Will California schools and colleges make a coed category a reality? That remains to be seen.
Joe Piechowski is a Ventura County Community College District trustee. He writes about UCLA sports at TheMightyBruin.com.
Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters
California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn California Post Sports Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X California Post Opinion California Post Newsletters: Sign up here! California Post App: Download here! Home delivery: Sign up here!Page Six Hollywood: Sign up here!
The post California can’t evade Supreme Court decision on transgender sports appeared first on New York Post.
