The U.S. Department of Education announced on Friday that it will be creating what it called a "Title IX Special Investigations Team" that would be dedicated to swiftly resolving complaints about trans female athletes in sports. It was the sort of announcement the Trump administration has made nearly every day since taking office months ago—high-flown, vague, aligned with a conservative media fixation, and ominous. Just as telling as anything in the announcement was what was missing from it: facts.
The announcement contained no information about exactly how many complaints the department had received about trans athletes. (Two? Five? Twenty?) It did not say who filed these complaints. (Parents? Students? Teachers?) It did not say when those complaints were received. It did not even bother to say what those complaints were about, beyond some extremely ambiguous, predictably overheated language referring to "pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities." Anyone looking for something as basic to democracy as public accountability from a public agency would have to look elsewhere.
Instead, the statement from wrestling executive-turned-education secretary Linda McMahon insisted, with zero evidence, that this team was necessary to "streamline Title IX investigations" and provide "rapid resolution" to manage this mysterious "increasing volume" of cases. This led to the expected canned press-release quotes about how this fast-moving strike team will make it easier for the Education Department to protect women. But protect women from what? About halfway through, the announcement finally bothered to give the briefest acknowledgement of what this is all supposedly about, with a McMahon statement about schools that "allow men to compete in women’s sports and use women’s intimate facilities." In other words, the strike team's goal is to focus what remains of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which is already a shell of its former self after massive layoffs and office closures, on keeping trans girls and women out of school sports.
As is always the case with political speech that's rich in fancy phrases and light on facts, the truth lay in what went unsaid. One such truth can be found in a ProPublica analysis of Education Department data from earlier this year, which is that about half of all complaints under investigation submitted to the Office for Civil Rights before the new administration took office concerned students with disabilities who weren't getting the accommodations they needed to learn. Another 26 percent were about racial discrimination, and an additional 8 percent were about sexual harassment or violence. The rest, per the report, were about what it called "a range of discrimination claims."
Their analysis made no mention of complaints about trans athletes. In fact, I kept searching for something—anything—from the current and former Education Department workers interviewed in recent weeks to see if anyone ever said something about being inundated with cases of people complaining about trans athletes, but I couldn't find it. Perhaps, yes, somewhere in all those thousands of cases is some number of complaints about trans athletes. But those complaints, even if they exist, would represent a vanishingly small percentage in a sea of very real complaints about harassment, racial discrimination, and unequal access for students with disabilities, all of which are now even less likely to be investigated and resolved.
It's likely that this Education Department isn't putting forward specifics because those specifics would disprove its entire theorem of existence. It wants us to believe that there is a deluge of trans girls putting all of girls' sports in jeopardy. There are female athletes who have complained very loudly about the inclusion of trans women in women's sports, with a few trans athletes famously singled out; some of the people doing that complaining have built careers in conservative media off the notoriety brought to them via those complaints. But it's important not to confuse one type of volume with another—the ability to shout about something, to use the amplification that culture war allies reliably provide, does not correlate at all with how widespread something is.
That's why those public appeals and government statements are so light on fact and loaded up with emotional language. I keep waiting for the administration to provide actual numbers about the deluge of trans girls who are suddenly dominating all of girls sports and wiping out every opportunity for everyone else, the "entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans," as Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville put it on Fox News last weekend. It hasn't happened.
There are not reliable statistics on how many cisgender athletes have been injured by transgender athletes. There, too, all the information is anecdotal, and the number of reports pales in comparison to, say, the number of female athletes who suffer concussions while playing youth soccer. But there is no equivalent call for any federal agency to suddenly investigate that very real crisis—let alone the leading cause of death in high school athletes, which is sudden cardiac arrest—because those cannot be turned into politically useful crusades. Additionally, we wrap our youth and college sports in so much language about teamwork, building character, and lessons that are more important than wins and losses, right up until the point that trans girls get involved. Then, suddenly, it is just about winning, after all.
For as long as there have been women, both men and our fellow women have insisted that we need protecting. And yet, somehow, that protection so often ends up giving those in power even more power over us. The Violence Against Women Act sent more men and women to prison. Mandatory arrest laws did too. What women need is equality—which is what the original language of Title IX called for. In Title IX, that means prevention of sexual assault and sexual harassment, equal access to athletics, and equal access to opportunities to learn, just to name a few examples. What women do not need is another government agency lording over us, telling us what is good for us, dictating who is and is not one of us, and only defining "protection" in one hyper-specific way.
Once, women fought for the right to equal treatment in education, and won it. Instead of trying to take that away from us via frontal assault, this administration has instead decided it will determine who deserves that "equal treatment"—who is protected, who isn't, and what "protected" even means. Don't you feel safer already?
Know anything about what's going on inside the U.S. Department of Education? Please reach out! You can reach me directly using diana@defector.com or @dmoskovitz.99 on Signal. You can also use our tips inbox.
