Dear Meteor readers,

I am sure you are still reeling from SCOTUS’s decision last week to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. I have been reflecting on these words from an interview our editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll did with journalist Rebecca Traister: “We are living in minority rule.” We are. That has to change. And, right now, I have to believe that one day it will.

Today, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate a milestone you might have missed amid last week’s chaos. My newsletter co-sherpa Shannon talks to Alexandra Brodsky about the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

But, first, we try to make sense of all this news.

Xo,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT’S GOING ON

The Disappointment party: Abortion advocates are increasingly frustrated with the response from Democratic leadership to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Despite having seven weeks to plan thanks to the same leaked documents we all saw, they have largely met the moment with flaccid displeasure instead of fiery rage. The only plan leadership has presented is to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Vote for what, my guy?? We voted the first hundred times around and y’all are not delivering! Someone, please engrave this line from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez onto Pelosi’s desk, “We simply cannot make promises, hector people to vote, and then refuse to use our full power when they do.” So we will vote, but we’re going to complain the entire time until AOC turns 35.

Truck of horrors: On Monday, a semi-truck containing migrants attempting to cross the border—most of whom had suffocated to death—was found abandoned on the side of the road in San Antonio, Texas. According to Time, Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security have stopped the entry of an estimated record-breaking 200,000 migrants in May alone. Why? Trump administration policies like Migrant Protection Protocols and Title 42, which have left the border “all but closed to legal migrants and asylum seekers” are still in place. The Biden administration has barely lifted a pinky to undo these policies; in fact, it fought to keep Title 42 in place. Yet all of this didn’t stop professional clown and Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott from blaming these deaths on Joe Biden’s “deadly open border policy.” Read a fucking book, Gregory.

Small wins: So-called “trigger bans” continue to go into effect after last week’s decision, but abortion providers in Texas, Utah, and Louisiana are fighting back. In Utah, doctors will temporarily be able to perform legal abortions (up to 18 weeks) after a judge granted a temporary restraining order on the enforcement of trigger laws. Similar restraining orders have been granted in Texas and Louisiana as well, although, in the case of Texas, patients can only legally have an abortion if they are within the six-week threshold. (You’ve probably heard this a million times but it is worth repeating: most pregnant people don’t even know they are pregnant until around eight or nine weeks.) Click here to find out what you can do for those seeking abortion right now.

AND:

• Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is reportedly removing social media posts related to abortion pills on the grounds that they violate the company’s standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.” Well, at least someone is being honest about the fact that uteruses in this country are now considered regulated goods.

• If you’re confused about how the overturning of Roe could affect ectopic pregnancies, here’s a helpful explainer.

• Justice Stephen Breyer will officially be stepping down from his post on Thursday—and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s time on the court will begin. Godspeed, Justice, we’re all going to need it.

• R. Kelly has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking. After years of credible accusations and survivors’ stories being ignored, often because they were young Black women, let’s hope this provides some semblance of justice.

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY

Could Title IX Go the Way of Roe?

An assessment from Alexandra Brodsky, who’s spent her career fighting to expand this now-50-year-old law

BY SHANNON MELERO

AN NCAA BASKETBALL PLAYER SPORTING TITLE IX LANGUAGE ON HER WARM UP TEE (PHOTO BY ELSA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

If you missed the 50th anniversary of Title IX on June 23—no one would blame you. The gutting of reproductive rights in America happened the very next day, robbing all of us of any sense of joy.

Which is why it’s so crucial to celebrate the few victories we still have. Title IX—the 1972 law that significantly curtailed sex-based discrimination in education—carved a pathway for women and girls to compete in school athletics. This aided in the formation of professional women’s leagues and is why its birthday has been an orgy of well-produced commercials for sneakers and energy drinks.

While Title IX is best known for changing the sports landscape, it’s also done a lot of other things for girls, women, and non-binary people—like limiting gender-specific dress codes, allowing women to enroll in academic institutions previously closed to them, and, importantly, compelled schools and campuses to take steps in handling sexual assault.

To understand what the 50th anniversary of Title IX means—and whether it, like Roe, could be at risk—I spoke to Alexandra Brodsky, an attorney, advocate, founder of Know Your IX, and author of Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash.

Shannon Melero: So Title IX is most closely associated with protections for women in athletics, but can you get into what other protections it offers? 

Alexandra Brodsky: Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in schools and other educational programs that receive federal funding. That includes all public schools for every age group, and almost all private colleges and universities. Title IX requires equal access to educational programs, like STEM classes, for students of all genders. It prohibits schools from discriminating against pregnant and parenting students. It forbids anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. It forbids sex discrimination in school discipline. As I discuss in my book, Title IX also requires schools to prevent and address sexual harassment, including sexual violence.

We are now living post-Roe, a reality that felt improbable for quite some time until it just wasn’t. Are we at or near the risk of losing protections given to us under Title IX?

I don’t think Title IX itself is going anywhere, but I do think we are seeing a concerted effort by anti-feminists to water it down. The Trump administration fought Title IX’s protections for queer and trans students and weakened the rights of student survivors of sexual harassment—something Biden [has begun to fix]. Courts keep imposing technical obstacles to Title IX’s enforcement.

Going back to 50 years ago, was there a catalyst event that led to the birth of Title IX? 

Title IX was passed in 1972, during a wave of federal civil rights legislation. And it was passed to address widespread, blatant discrimination in education. Women were just fed up. Back then, it was taken for granted that women and girls would have fewer athletic opportunities. They were also often excluded from traditionally “male” academic disciplines. Many colleges and universities didn’t allow women to attend at all, or set strict quotas to limit their attendance. And female teachers faced blatant sex discrimination, including lower pay.

DESPITE TITLE IX PROTECTIONS, CAMPUS SEXUAL ASSAULT IS PRESENT AS EVER (PHOTO BY CHELSEA GUGLIELMINO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Is there a specific case we can point to in Title IX’s history that functioned as a turning point—in the way that Roe was so defining for abortion rights? 

There’s nothing quite so path-determinative as Roe, but the first Title IX case heard by the Supreme Court in 1979 was Cannon v. University of Chicago. Geraldine Cannon sued the University of Chicago’s medical school over its discriminatory admissions policy. By the time the case made its way to the Supreme Court, the question was whether private individuals like Geraldine could bring Title IX lawsuits on their own behalf, or whether they had to depend on the federal government to enforce Title IX. And the Supreme Court said, yes, Geraldine could bring her own suit. I know that probably sounds boring and technical but it’s so important. We’ve seen from the Trump administration that students can’t always depend on the federal government to care about sex discrimination in schools. Students have to be able to advocate for themselves.

Another big case is Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, and it really demonstrates the dual sides of Title IX’s history. [A parent sued the Monroe County, Georgia BOE on behalf of her daughter claiming the school did not do enough to prevent sexual harassment between students.] There, the Supreme Court said that schools had a responsibility under Title IX to address student-on-student sexual harassment. That was huge! But the Court also announced a legal standard that would require schools to address only “severe and pervasive” harassment, and said they only had to respond in a way that wasn’t “clearly unreasonable.” Basically, schools could mistreat survivors so long as they didn’t mistreat them really badly. So even in this moment of triumph, we saw the Court imposing real limitations on students’ rights.

To your point, how have we seen Title IX develop over the last 50 years? Have protections shrunk or expanded? 

The answer is really both. Courts and advocates have, over the years, recognized Title IX’s breadth, and seen how it can protect students who experience all these different kinds of sex discrimination. That progress is still ongoing. Just last week, a federal appeals court published a big opinion explaining that Title IX forbids discriminatory dress codes that impose different rules on boys and girls. And recently we’ve seen advocates successfully use Title IX to challenge transphobic school policies and state laws. So, in that way, protections have expanded.

But, at the same time, courts have adopted rules and standards that make it quite difficult for students to enforce their rights. For example, the Supreme Court has established a very high bar for student survivors to hold their schools accountable in court for mishandling sexual harassment allegations. Many courts have also held that students can’t sue over what we call “disparate impact” violations—basically when a school’s policy isn’t discriminatory on its face, but disproportionately hurts women and girls. Opinions like those have shrunk Title IX’s power. 

How is the media doing at covering Title IX and campus or high school sexual assault? 

We’ve seen media coverage of sexual harassment in schools do a lot of good, and also do a lot of harm. In the early years of my organizing, smart reporting by journalists like Katie Baker and Tyler Kingkade did a lot to spur public attention and policy reform. And USA Today has recently been doing a lot of great investigative work into the nitty-gritty of how schools respond to sexual violence. But we’ve also seen media promote a narrative that support for survivors poses a direct and unjust threat to men and boys—[even] though a man is more likely to be sexually assaulted himself than to be falsely accused of doing so. And that narrative has had terrible policy consequences, ultimately leading to Trump’s Title IX regulations.

What can the average person do to ensure that we don’t lose the protections that we’ve gained under Title IX? 

National advocacy is certainly important, so it’s great if people can contribute their skills or support to organizations like Know Your IX or the place I work, Public Justice. But there’s also so much work that can be done on the local level. In recent years we’ve seen K-12 and college students organizing to push their schools to do better by sexual assault survivors. We’ve also seen really effective protests of discriminatory dress codes that have resulted in concrete policy changes. So my answer is basically: figure out what students are doing at your local high school, or at a nearby college, and follow their lead.

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