Last week, I attended a school board meeting for the Southlake-Carroll Independent School District in North Texas which has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education over its changes to Title IX.
This is the school district in Southlake, Texas, made famous by their bitter battle over racism and the school board’s response to it — the introduction of a Cultural Competence Action Plan that Republican extremists rallied to defeat. The battle over that plan and the fallout from it was captured by NBC’s Peabody Award–winning and Pulitzer Prize finalist “Southlake” podcast and are featured in the recent book by journalist Mike Hixenbaugh, They Came for the Schools.
The school district continues to fight the ongoing seven civil rights investigations by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights stemming from this episode in the school district’s recent past.
Southlake and several communities adjoining it north of Fort Worth have been called Ground Zero of the fight against Christian nationalism in public education.
Just prior to the recent school board meeting, Texas Values, an extremist, Christian nationalist organization, held a press conference in support of Southlake-Carroll’s lawsuit. For those who haven’t been following the news, the Department of Education recently updated the language and rules relating to the implementation of Title IX. Specifically, the language broadens the anti-discrimination rules to cover nonbinary and transgender students.
“Their focus is on performative public acts and lawsuits intended to give audience to their Christian nationalist beliefs.”
There is, perhaps, nothing more polarizing in the culture wars today than whether medical treatments should be available to minors with gender dysphoria; however, a close second is what accommodations public schools should make for these young people. The issue has been a lightning rod for years, and with the DOE’s recent updates, a new front has opened in the culture wars.
In Southlake last week, the focus of nearly all the speakers at the press conference and the school board meeting was the preservation of girls’ “sexual purity” — not how these changes to Title IX might impact girls’ competitive sports programs and opportunities. This is especially telling of the motivations behind Southlake-Carroll’s lawsuit.
There are legitimate concerns over how the changes to Title IX will affect biological women and girls in competitive sports. But engaging questions about the empowerment of women and girls isn’t the focus of Christian nationalists in the Southlake-Carroll ISD or elsewhere. Rather, their focus is on performative public acts and lawsuits intended to give audience to their Christian nationalist beliefs.
A recent history of Title IX and competitive sports
The Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was signed into law by then-President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972. The law was authored by Hawaiian Rep. Patsy Mink, the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to the United States House of Representatives. The law prohibits sex discrimination in any educational program or activity that receives federal aid.
For more than 50 years, Title IX has ensured that athletics programs for girls and women receive funding and resources on par with that of boys and men. It has withstood numerous attempts to weaken its force — from attempts to exclude revenue-generating (men’s) sports from Title IX compliance to excluding everything but scholarships from Title IX compliance.
More recently, Title IX has ensured that girls’ and women’s sports teams (pre-K through college) have the same opportunities for competition that boys’ and men’s teams do rather than being relegated to noncompetitive leagues in off-seasons. It also has extended protections against sexual harassment and sexual violence to student athletes.
The U.S. Department of Education’s first attempts to extend protections to transgender students occurred in May 2016 under the Trump administration. Those protections allowed that “schools are permitted to operate sex-segregated athletic teams, but they cannot adopt requirements that are based on stereotypes about differences between transgender students and cisgender students.” Those protections were rescinded in 2017, in part because the original changes to Title IX were not made available for public comment before being issued.
On President Biden’s first day in office, he released Executive Order 13988, “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” The order said laws that prohibit sex discrimination, including Title IX, must be extended to cover transgender students, “so long as the laws do not contain sufficient indications to the contrary.”
In June 2021, the U.S. Department of Education issued new interpretations of existing regulations to extend Title IX protections to transgender students. In response, a handful of states, led by Texas, filed suit to stop that expansion.
“The worlds of college and Olympic sports also have been navigating how to balance the rights of biological women with transgender women.”
In 2022 and 2023, the U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules governing Title IX and opened the proposals up for public comments. The Department of Education released its final rules in April 2024 along with extensive commentary on the public comments, fact sheets and more.
As the fight over extending Title IX coverage to transgender students has played out in the educational arena, the worlds of college and Olympic sports also have been navigating how to balance the rights of biological women with transgender women.
In 2022, college swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender woman to win a Division I national championship. Thomas, who competed in college swimming as a man before going through a gender transition and competing as a woman, presented competitive sports with its first real-world case in determining whether transgender women should be competing against biological women.
As a result, in June 2022 the governing body for elite swimming, World Aquatics, established new rules “allowing transgender women to compete in women’s events only if they transitioned before the age of 12 or before one of the early stages of puberty.” The ruling excludes transgender women who underwent male puberty, like Thomas, from participating in women’s races. Thomas recently lost her appeal of the new rules and is disqualified from competing in the upcoming Olympics women’s swimming events.
Similarly, earlier this year, track and field’s global governing body disqualified Kenyan sprinter Maximila Imali, who is intersex, from competing against other women in the Olympics track and field events because her testosterone levels are said to give her an unfair advantage against biological women.
There are real biological differences between natal female athletes and transgender women athletes that give an unfair competitive advantage to the latter. This competitive advantage is one of the very things Title IX was initially intended to counter in educational settings. Biological female athletes continue to rely on the protections and opportunities afforded by Title IX in order to fairly compete in sports.
Purity culture and Christian nationalism
But this path of competitive fairness isn’t the path Southlake-Carroll ISD and its partisan supporters, Texas Values, Patriot Mobile, Southlake Families PAC, and Alliance Defending Freedom (which took up this lawsuit free of charge) care about. With coded purity culture language and, at times spiritual warfare rhetoric, these extremist Christian nationalists have chosen to wage war to impose their religious beliefs about gender and sexuality across the board rather than to fight for equal competitive playing fields for the girls they purport to be fighting for.
Speaker after speaker at the press conference and school board meeting resurrected harmful purity culture language to demonize transgender students and the DOE’s language updates. Purity culture also has been shown time and again to normalize patriarchal oppression (including rape culture) and cause lifelong psychological and emotional harm to both men and women.
Over and again speakers warned the Title IX rule changes would lead to “men in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms” and proclaimed the changes are a “war on little girls.” Elected officials and political operatives repeatedly blamed the Biden administration for “taking away safe spaces for our daughters” and promised “protection of our young ladies.”
That Southlake-Carroll ISD has chosen this line of attack — protecting girls from men “posing” as women — is quite telling considering the majority of transgender students these days are biological girls who now identify as transgender boys. Yet not one speaker mentioned any concern for biological boys being exposed to women in their “safe spaces.”
In a recent panel discussion, sociologist Andrew Whitehead laid out specific criteria for identifying Christian nationalism. It is easily identified by people or groups who desire a “specific expression of Christianity lifted up in public life, defended by the government with this extra cultural layer of traditionalist social policies and practices, comfort with authoritarian social control, strict ethno-racial lines, populism and conspiratorial thinking.”
“Purity culture has long been tied up with Christian nationalism.”
What has happened in Southlake and is happening across the country in school districts with extremist Republican governors is straight up Christian nationalism. Purity culture has long been tied up with Christian nationalism. One could say it is the sexual ethic of the ideology.
It is also rooted in racist ideas of racial purity and the need to protect the “purity” of white women from Black men. Gender identity and, more specifically, transgender students, have become one more thing to “protect” young girls’ innocence from.
This is why we are seeing bills targeting a student’s use of a name and pronouns not listed on their birth certificate alongside bills that require teaching the Christian Bible and displaying the Ten Commandments in direct opposition to the separation of church and state.
The scale and escalation of the Christian nationalist takeover of public school boards is both breathtaking and terrifying for anyone who believes in the separation of church and state.
In fact, on January 22, without reason or warning, the Southlake-Carroll school board president, Cameron Bryan, announced that moving forward each school board meeting would begin with a prayer. A quick survey of school board meetings around the DFW area showed prayer in school board meetings is an anomaly.
Interestingly, it wasn’t just any prayer that the school board inaugurated this new policy with. The first prayer offered at the school board meeting was what is known as the Jabez prayer from 1 Chronicles 4:10: “Oh, God, that you would bless us indeed that you would enlarge our territory! That your hand would be with us, that you would keep us from evil, that we may not cause pain. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
If Christians do not begin standing up against the Christian nationalists in our midst to stop the takeovers of all spheres of public life, we will eventually find even our own expressions of Christianity will not protect us or our children.
Mara Bim
Mara Richards Bim is serving as a Clemons Fellow with BNG. She is a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater practitioner, playwright and director and founder of Cry Havoc Theater Company that operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
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