When he failed to enact his agenda through Congress, President Obama famously reacted by saying he still had his phone and his pen. Unfortunately, his bureaucrats in federal agencies also had their own phones and a lot of pens. One prominent federal civil rights statute — Title IX — was repeatedly targeted for interpretation and reinterpretation within the Obama administration.
Title IX is the 1972 statute that protects girls’ and women’s athletics, and prevents schools from tolerating sexual harassment or other sex discrimination. But in 2015, one bureaucrat in the Department of Education (DOE) announced sweeping new Title IX policy in a letter to a transgender rights activist, saying that schools throughout the country also had to treat a person’s so-called gender identity as conclusive for the purpose of assigning students to “restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes.”