USPIE’s July Millstone Award goes to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona

The Department of Education says its update to Title IX won’t implicate sports or allow transgenders to compete against biological females.

But the nationwide, 1,500-word directive includes 31 references to sports and “gender identity” discrimination in any extracurricular activity.

The order expands the definition of sex discrimination and harassment to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” This will have profound implications for female-only spaces, conservative legal scholars told Fox News Digital.

“It’s absolutely a fantastical upending of our system of constitutional protection,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said.

“Education Secretary Miguel Cardona insists that sports won’t be affected. But adding gender identity to Title IX will coerce schools into allowing students to participate in sports teams that correspond with their preferred gender, not their biological sex,” says Sheri Few, founder and president of United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE.org).

“He gets the ‘award’ for signing the rules that turn Title IX into a free pass for biological men and boys to invade women’s and girls’ sports and locker rooms.”

USPIE’s Millstone of the Month Award is given to the person or organization involved in government schools who has committed the most egregious acts against children.

“The Biden administration continues to misrepresent their radical policies, which if left in place will ruin sports for girls and women and force everyone to lie about male and female sexuality. This is about more than sports. It is about an oppressive government ordering American citizens to lie — or else,” says Few.

Institutions that don’t comply with Title IX risk losing federal funding — often a big part of the budget for colleges and universities.

A federal appeals court sided with a transgender plaintiff, “BPJ,” echoing the Department of Justice’s recent opinion that separating sports by biological sex is a form of discrimination under Title IX.

In response, the Alliance Defending Freedom is representing the parents of Adaleia Cross, who has filed a Tennessee lawsuit against Mr. Cardona alleging that the Title IX update amounts to an illegal rewrite. According to one ADF filing, “BPJ “displaced biological girls in sports events over 700 times from 2021 to 2024.

In the lawsuit, Adaleia Cross alleges that “BPJ” used the female locker room, sexually harassed her, and repeatedly beat her in track and field, before finally getting edged out of competition in throwing events. Adaleia’s parents said they believe the most recent Title IX rule will cause many more bad experiences like their daughter’s to occur on a nationwide level.

“The first set of Title IX rules was intended to bring ‘clarity’ for ‘stakeholders’ about laws passed in states that limit athletes’ participation in sports according to their biological sex at birth,” says Few. “President Biden’s Executive Orders 13988 and 14021 directed the development of both sets of the ominous Title IX rules, which bear the theme of preventing harm to students by not honoring their ‘gender identity.’ The new rules will unravel the safeguards Title IX offers women and girls in government schools and will instead ‘protect’ ‘transgender’ students. The push to edit Title IX to benefit ‘transgender women’ undermines the very foundation Title IX was built on.”

There are 24 states that have laws that keep women’s sports exclusive to biological females, but legal experts say the Biden administration’s Title IX update, if successfully implemented, would overrule those laws.

“We don’t need any more evidence to declare Education Secretary Miguel Cardona the clear ‘winner,’” Few says. “The policy is outrageous and Mr. Cardona’s willingness to sign these rules is galling.”

United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is a nonprofit, nationwide coalition that seeks to return education to its proper local roots and restore parental authority over their children’s education by helping parents and local communities to escape federal and other national influences. It is the vision of USPIE to create a culture where parents, empowered with the authority to choose what and how their children learn, are the undisputed primary educators of their children, where local schools operate in support of families, and where education is unencumbered by federal mandates.

For more information on United States Parents Involved in Education, visit www.uspie.org or follow  USPIE on Facebook or Twitter.