I see that President Biden is finally beginning to acknowledge the huge mistake the Democrats made in the management of the transgender issue – a sentence I write with greater precision than most.
The Biden administration on Thursday proposed new regulations that would allow schools to bar transgender athletes from participating in competitive high school and college sports, but disallow blanket bans on the athletes that have been approved across the country.
The rules would narrow when discrimination of trans athletes would be permitted. But they also would offer guidelines for when schools could bar their participation.
Under the proposal, schools would need to consider a range of factors before imposing a ban on trans athletes and would need to justify it based on educational grounds, such as the need for fairness. So, for instance, a school district could justify a ban on transgender athletes on their competitive high school track and field team, whereas a district would have a harder time making that case for an intramural middle school kickball squad. [WaPo]
But notice how much more difficult of a process this has the potential to be. Rather than a quicksilver debate, in which points can be made rapidly, digested, and responded to, now we have the painful, blocky, and undoubtedly politically ugly process of proposed rules changes. Those who promulgated or approved of the original Title IX rules changes in the Obama Administration will be outraged, it’ll move quite slowly as those who bought into, or were bullied into, have to think it through.
It’s potentially a mess.
And it’s an embarrassment for the Democrats, but I suppose that’s better than actually acknowledging their abrogation of the foundational tenet of liberal democracy, that of not imposing profound new rules on society, but rather engaging in discussion, debate, and persuasion. Such an acknowledgment, itself improperly handled, could make them look like they operate on the same level as that pack of fourth-raters who call themselves the Republican Party these days.
Predicting a long and messy campaign for society to figure out how to manage transgenderism.
