President-elect Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to get men out of women’s sports and eliminate the federal Department of Education.
He seems intent on keeping both promises. But how?
In announcing Linda McMahon, Small Business Administration chief in his first term, his pick to lead the department Wednesday, Trump declared, “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and LINDA will spear head that effort.”
Women’s-only spaces are guaranteed under Title IX — which the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights enforces, usually by withholding federal funding from unlawful institutions.
How would that happen if the department is abolished?
Independent Women’s Law Center Director May Mailman, a former Trump legal adviser who served in his first White House, admits it’s a conundrum.
“I don’t even know if the right has completely figured out where it wants to be in that space because if you have a promise of eliminating the Department of Education, then you have far less oversight — zero oversight,” she told The Post.
“Title IX has a private right of action, so individuals can sue too,” Mailman explained. “So I still think that there will be a lot of work to be done by groups on the right that litigate, that maybe will no longer be litigating against the now-Biden administration but can litigate against colleges who are depriving students of rights.”
Colleges must be put on notice that noncompliance can be costly, and Mailman notes the law’s enforcement will come down to the personnel in the next Trump administration.
“I think you can make a few high-profile examples. And it would be my hope that those high-profile examples are not the Harvards and the Yales because these colleges, they don’t need the money,” Mailman said. “Honestly, they can just not take the money. They have huge endowments, and they can be as racist and sexist as they want to be.
What will “affect the majority of human beings going to college will be to make a really high-profile example of a school that needs the money,” Mailman continued. “So let’s just say San Diego State. And if you take that college and bring a high-profile investigation and pull it all the way through, and you do it quickly, and you show that this is a head of civil rights who’s not messing around, I think you’ll see a lot of behavior changes.”
Still, she said, the coming internal debate offers hope for female athletes and women who want to preserve single-sex spaces after a dismal four years under Democrats.
Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Post — after a Wednesday panel Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) organized on protecting children from “gender-affirming care” — the civil-rights laws under the Department of Education could be moved to the Department of Justice.
But Perry warned that “centralizing power in one law enforcement agency with an” Office of Civil Rights could lead to a “politicized Department of Justice who is once again taking federal law and saying it’s back to gender identity” after a future blue wave.
“So that does make me a little nervous, but unraveling the Department of Education would be a good start,” she concluded.
Payton McNabb, however, has no mixed feelings. The former North Carolina high-school volleyball player continues to face medical issues stemming from injuries she sustained as a junior competing against a biologically male athlete.
One of the male player’s powerful spikes knocked McNabb unconscious for more than 30 seconds; onlookers said her body had twisted into a “fencing position,” indicating extreme trauma to the brain.
Doctors told McNabb she had a concussion, brain bleed and permanent whiplash. She still suffers from “partial paralysis on my right side, vision problems, cognitive issues, having to get extra help in school, which is something that I’ve never had to deal with.”
McNabb told The Post, “I’m very excited that we will have an administration now that is willing to step up for women and protect their right to their own spaces and sports. Just having someone that even knows what a woman is is helpful. I have a lot of good feelings about the next four years, and I’m very thankful for the outcome.”
Trump has promised to tackle the President Biden’s Title IX changes head on.
“I will immediately on my first day sign an executive order to keep men out of women’s sports. That will take about 10 minutes,” he said in a summer speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road To Majority conference in Washington, DC.
The president-elect reiterated his commitment to reverse the Biden administration’s gender-bending agenda at a June rally in Chesapeake, Va.
“On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children,” Trump said. “And I will keep men out of women’s sports.”
