Inez Stepman on Biden’s Jaw-Dropping Plans to Redefine Sex
CLAY: We’re joined by Inez Stepman, senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, host of the High Noon podcast. And, Inez, I read your piece in the Wall Street Journal. It was fantastic. It was scary. I think many in our audience are not aware of where we’re headed. That opinion was called, “Biden’s Title IX Rewrite is an Assault on Women’s Rights.”
CLAY: And, Inez, I come from a world of sports so I spent a lot of time talking about the Penn transgender swimmer and the assault upon women’s athletics that’s starting to take place in college. And things are going to get even wilder as it pertains to Title IX based on your editorial. Thanks for coming on. Tell our audience where we are headed and what is likely to happen in the near future in this regard.
STEPMAN: Well, thank you so much for having me on to talk about this, and it is one of those incredibly important issues that is flying under the radar, I think just because there’s so much else that is bad in the world right now. These deep changes, there are three major buckets of these changes. Each one affects either a core constitutional right or in the case of what you referenced with regard to women’s rights, a basic fact of reality, right, that men and women are biologically different. This is a huge regulation that’s going to impact just about every school in America from kindergarten all the way through graduate school.
BUCK: Inez, how is this supposed to affect the system? What are the changes going to be? Effectively so Title IX will include trans rights in schools. So what will that mean? For the people listening, if they have kids in school, kids in college, how will policies be influenced by this?
STEPMAN: So, first of all, this change entirely erases women from American civil rights law by redefining the word “sex” to include gender identity. This will make nearly every school in the country accept men or boys who identify as female across the board as women, meaning admitted to women’s sports, admitted to women’s locker rooms, admitted to dorm rooms and universities, sororities, you name it. Any program in a school that recognizes that women are women and men are men, girls and boys are different, that program will be in violation of American civil rights law.
So that’s one huge sweeping change. A second huge sweeping change is basically everything I think that happened to Kavanaugh — I think that’s the thing people are most sort of aware of — this system where mere accusation ends up destroying someone’s life and there’s no real due process that can actually uncover the truth of any of this. So that’s the second bucket of changes. They’re removing a lot of the due process protections that have actually been upheld by the Supreme Court.
And the third huge bucket of this is it impinges into free speech, and the best example actually of this was a case out in Wisconsin, which is already anticipating these changes to Title IX, in which a school is punishing an eighth grader via Title IX investigation — U.S. civil rights law investigation — for refusing to use “they, them” pronouns for his classmate. That’s the kind of level of a changes that Biden administration bureaucrats are pushing through, likely in a couple of weeks.
CLAY: Inez, I want to build on one of these, because I think it’s a tangible reality that many people could suddenly find themselves confronting. Basically, this would mean that if a guy — biological male, has male genitalia — decided he wanted to start using women’s locker rooms at, let’s say, the gym on campus, this would be permitted and required in some way that you would have to treat that decision legitimately based on the way that this transgender policy is being applied to the new school dynamics. Am I understanding that correctly in terms of a tangible reality, which we’ve already seen with the Penn transgender swimmer, where that male individual got to use the women’s locker room? This is crazy, I think, to a lot of people out there listening to us right now.
STEPMAN: That’s 100% correct. The school will be required, under pain of losing their funding from the federal government, and also having investigations launched into the school. The school will be required to allow Lia Thomas into the pool and into the locker room with biological women. And this is self-identification, right? “Gender identity” is not actually defined. So it’s anything that someone identifies as. There are no requirements to have, say, surgery or not to have male genitalia. We’re talking about exactly what you said. Allowing boys and men into every single female space in almost every school in America by law.
CLAY: Inez, a lot of people are hearing this right now their jaws are dropping. You’re a woman. I think I can define that, accurately still.
STEPMAN: (laughing)
CLAY: To a lot of people, wives, daughters, girlfriends, people out there, the idea of a man just being able to walk into a women’s locker room because he claims that he is identifying as a woman, this is madness, right? It’s madness on an epic scale. It’s also dangerous, and it’s been considered — up to this point — a crime. You would get arrested if you tried to do this for much of modern history in the United States.
STEPMAN: Yes, that’s exactly right. And yeah, it sounds insane to most people because most people have a shred of common sense left and they realize that males and females are different and there’s a very good reason why we have separate locker rooms, for example, for boys and girls in college. This makes total sense to most people. But we’re now in the grips of this very radical gender ideology, and the Biden administration is moving forward with these incredibly radical changes — pushed through, by the way, by unelected bureaucrats, right? This didn’t go through Congress.
There was no debate among the American people as to whether or not we want to make it part of our civil rights law that men with penises should be allowed in locker rooms for women. There’s been no opportunity for the American people to weigh in on that question, right? This is going to be pushed through by the deep state, by unelected bureaucrats — in addition, severely limiting the First Amendment and your right to due process. This is a huge regulation that does massively more than most acts of Congress and yet the American people have not been given an opportunity to democratically weigh in on it.
BUCK: We’re speaking to Inez Stepman senior policy analyst of the Independent Women’s Forum. She has a podcast. She’s the host of the podcast High Noon. Inez, before I let you go, I have to ask you about this. This is what Ron DeSantis said that Biden is “totally off his rocker,” according to the Daily Mail, “over claims that his administration is threatening to pull school lunch money at the federal level unless there is adoption of the LGBTQ+ policies.” Is that real?
STEPMAN: Yeah, that would be in compliance. I think what’s happening right now is all of the agencies across the Biden administration. Some of them are just coming out before other ones, but they’re in the process of essentially redefining sex so that it erases the concept of women and men from the federal law. And that means all federal programs that recognize those kinds of differences. All of those programs potentially will see massive changes. And, yes, the school lunch program is one of them. They are threatening to yank hot lunches for kids if the school doesn’t comply with this radical transgender redefinition of sex. That’s what’s going on across the country, and you can expect more of it.
BUCK: Inez Stepman. Inez, thanks so much for being with us. We appreciate it.
STEPMAN: Thanks so much.
