WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) Civil Rights Division announced Monday that it is filing a Title IX sex-discrimination complaint against the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) for letting biological males into female school lockers and athletic competitions.
“These unfair, intentionally discriminatory practices violate the very core of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal funding,” said DOJ’s press release, which noted that Minnesota receives more than $3 billion in federal health and education assistance annually.
“In open defiance of Title IX’s anti-discrimination protections, Minnesota’s policies and practices create unfair competition, deny girls equal athletic opportunities, and expose girls to a hostile educational environment with heightened risks of physical injury and psychological harm.”
“The Trump Administration does not tolerate flawed state policies that ignore biological reality and unfairly undermine girls on the playing field,” declared U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This Department of Justice is proud to partner with HHS and the Department of Education to protect our girls in Minnesota and across the country.”
“The Justice Department cannot ignore a state’s brazen defiance of federal antidiscrimination law,” added Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. “In service of radical gender ideology, Minnesota’s actions violate Title IX and deny female athletes their hard-earned trophies, records, dignity, and safety.”
The Hill reports that Democrat state Attorney General Keith Ellison responded that “Donald Trump is currently facing an unpopular war that he launched, rising gas prices, massive health insurance price hikes, and a partial government shutdown caused in part by his ICE agents killing two Minnesotans in broad daylight. It is astonishing that any president would try to target, shame, and harass children just trying to be themselves, let alone a president with so many actual problems to address.”
Ellison also attempted to cast the complaint as an attempt to deflect from Minnesota’s own lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s rules against transitioning gender-confused minors. “This new suit is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that’s already been in litigation for months. I will continue to stand up to the Trump administration and do everything in my power to stop them from bullying vulnerable children in Minnesota,” he said.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
Critics also argue that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy”; therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much, via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, which found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.
In America since the 1980s, more than 1,941 gold medals in female events that would have gone to female athletes have instead been claimed by men identifying as “trans women,” and along with them more than $493,173 in prize money across more than 10,067 amateur and professional events, according to data compiled by He Cheated and reviewed by Concerned Women for America.
