Female athletes and their families are gearing up for legal battles as high school athletic associations in California and Minnesota face a federal investigation for refusing to implement President Donald Trump’s recent executive order banning men from women’s sports.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced investigations Wednesday into the Minnesota State High School League and the California Interscholastic Federation, both of which announced they would abide by state law rather than federal Title IX law and continue allowing male athletes to compete in girls sports and use girls’ private spaces.
“The Minnesota State High School League and the California Interscholastic Federation are free to engage in all the meaningless virtue-signaling that they want, but at the end of the day, they must abide by federal law,” acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a public statement. “OCR’s [Office for Civil Rights’] Chicago and San Francisco regional offices will conduct directed investigations into both organizations to ensure that female athletes in these states are treated with the dignity, respect, and equality that the Trump Administration demands.”
Both organizations have yet to change their bylaws to accommodate Trump’s recent executive order, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports.” The order, signed Feb. 5, directs federal agencies to ensure that entities that receive federal funding interpret Title IX law according to biological sex, not the sex someone chooses to “identify” as.
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