Ryan Walters tells school superintendents to ignore new Title IX guidelines on gender orientation

State schools Superintendent Ryan Walters has sent a memo to Oklahoma school districts calling recent federal rules changes involving Title IX interpretation "illegal and unconstitutional" and saying districts that comply with them would be in danger of violating state and federal law.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced the new Title IX rules on April 19. Among other things, the federal government said discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity now is covered under the law’s anti-discrimination provisions. The final regulations take effect on Aug. 1.

“For more than 50 years, Title IX has promised an equal opportunity to learn and thrive in our nation's schools free from sex discrimination,” Cardona said in a statement. “These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming, and respect their rights.”

Walters, who took office in January 2023, has been a critic of Cardona and the changes to Title IX interpretation, saying there are only two genders and labeling transgender ideology as “radical.” He told television station KOCO on Wednesday he’d sent letters to Biden and Cardona saying Oklahoma “will not comply with this.”

“There’s boys and there’s girls,” Walters said. “We want to protect girls' sports. We know there’s two genders. We want every human being to be treated with dignity and respect. That’s every student in every school. But we also have common-sense policies. We’re not going to allow a boy to go into the girls’ bathroom because they claim to identify as a girl that day. It endangers girls. We’ve seen assaults of girls in the girls’ bathroom by male students claiming to be girls. We’re not going to allow it.

“We’re not going to gut girls’ sports and allow boys to go beat girls in their own respective sports because of a gender ideology, so we’re going to continue to affirm truth and common sense in our schools and we’re going to do that by treating everybody with dignity and respect also.”

Although Walters focused on the issue of transgender competition in sports, the federal government did not rule on whether transgender and nonbinary students can participate on the sports teams that align with their gender.

The administration released a proposed rule in April 2023 that said schools and colleges largely could not ban nonbinary and transgender students from sports teams in the new Title IX rules.

In May 2022, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law a provision that limits access to public school bathrooms by a person's birth sex. Under that law, school districts and charter schools face a 5% deduction in their state funding if they don’t comply.

Stitt also was among nine Republican governors who signed a letter to the NCAA in June 2022, asking it to change its existing Transgender Student Athlete Policy so that it would “guarantee a fair environment” for female athletes.

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Senate passed a bill called the “Women’s Bill of Rights,” which its sponsors say updates state law to ensure all statutory references to women refer to a person’s biological sex. Walters has called the bill “common sense legislation.”

Walters tells school superintendents to ignore new federal guidelines

In the letter Walters said he sent to Oklahoma superintendents, he said he’d had discussions with “several other state education leaders and legal counsel” before sending the letter. It’s unclear what attorneys Walters might have consulted, since all four attorneys employed by the Oklahoma State Department of Education — which Walters leads ― left the agency in March and have not yet been replaced.

Walters claims the new rules violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Administrative Procedures Act and “longstanding civil rights protections for women and girls.” He said he believes there will be court challenges to the new rules.

“Please do not make any district policy changes based on the new Title IX regulations,” Walters told superintendents. “These federal rules changes are illegal, and making policy changes before the courts come to a definitive ruling on the legality of these rules could put your district out of compliance with other current and legal state and federal statute.”

Cathryn Oakley, the senior director of legal policy for the Human Rights Campaign, said it would be unwise for Oklahoma school districts to not follow the federal guidelines.

“Yet again, Ryan Walters is choosing theatrics and extremism over protecting and furthering the needs of the students and schools he was elected to serve,” Oakley said. “Refusing to comply with Title IX could have damaging consequences for Oklahoma schools, including significant loss in funding on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars in a state that currently ranks 49th in academic achievement. It is clear that his only priority is himself and his own political profile — not Oklahoma students.”

The State Board of Education, which Walters chairs as state superintendent, is scheduled to hold its regular monthly meeting on Thursday.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Ryan Walters tells Oklahoma schools to not follow new Title IX rules