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Some have described the fight to protect women from the threats of gender ideology as “a war we shouldn’t have to be fighting.” Nonetheless, Americans who want to keep biological men out of women’s sports and private spaces battled on regardless. Recently, they got the good news that a federal district court judge in Kentucky issued a decision blocking the Biden administration’s unlawful rewrite of Title IX that replaced the word “sex” with “gender identity”. This, experts have said, was “a colossal ruling.”

On an edition of Washington Watch, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp further explained just how significant Thursday’s decision was. As he put it,

“We’ve had several courts across the country that have issued a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration’s unlawful Title IX rule … that impacts women’s privacy, safety, fairness, and sports. But what the Kentucky court did for the first time is actually vacate this rule. That means it’s essentially wiped off the books nationwide.”

Ultimately, Sharp added,

“Whether you’re in a red state, blue state, no matter where you are, the Biden administration and any future administrations cannot use this rule to try and force a school or college to allow men in [to] girls’ locker rooms, restrooms, on women’s teams, or violate any other rights to free speech or parental rights.”

Guest host Joseph Backholm asked what kind of impact this decision could have on life moving forward. While the future is still uncertain, Sharp suspects this ruling will at least “take the government’s boot off the neck of schools across the country.”

Ongoing Battle

But Sharp was quick to emphasise that the battle is far from over. There’s still a lot of work to do to ensure schools enact “good policies that protect privacy… speech, and parental rights, rather than undermining those important constitutional rights.” Even though the ruling has a “nationwide application,” Sharp contended, there are still those that “try and say that a man can be a woman and have access to women’s spaces and opportunities.”

For instance, there’s a coalition of female athletes and women’s advocacy groups who are continuing to put pressure on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) over their failure to “restore fairness and opportunity to collegiate sports.” On the same day the Kentucky district court struck down Biden’s Title IX rewrite, this group of concerned women sent a letter to President-elect Donald Trump asking him to use his “powerful voice to urge the NCAA to take action and clarify participation rules to protect the rights and opportunities of female athletes.”

The coalition goes by the name “Our Bodies, Our Sports” (OBOS), and their mission is for “the NCAA to repeal all policies and rules that allow male athletes who identify as female to take roster spots on women’s teams and compete in women’s events,” The Epoch Times reported.

OBOS’s letter comes as Trump plans to make good on his promises to protect girls’ and women’s sports. In December, he said at the 2024 AmericaFest,

“With a stroke of my pen on Day 1, we’re going to stop the transgender lunacy. And I will sign executive orders to end child mutilation, get transgender[s] out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools. And we will keep men out of women’s sports.”

Trump vowed that “under the Trump administration, it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders — male and female. It doesn’t sound too complicated. Does it?”

As of October of last year, 25 states have adopted laws that protect girls from having to compete against biological men. However, 25 states do not. So while Sharp celebrates the wins that have occurred, he warns that even after the Biden administration and beyond the NCAA,

“We’ve still got work to do … to go any place where they’re trying to undermine privacy, safety, or fairness in sports, and challenge those policies as well.”