Joint Statement by Women’s Rights Organizations: Keep Title IX’s Protections Broad

September 14. 2026

---

For Immediate Release
Sep 14, 2026

Media Contact
Nazirah Ahmad
[email protected]

Over fifty years ago, Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 with the clear purpose of comprehensively rooting out discriminatory barriers to educational opportunity for all students. Since then, Title IX has meaningfully expanded opportunities for women, girls, and all who face sex-based discrimination in schools. 

Our organizations have worked for decades to strengthen Title IX enforcement and ensure all women, girls, and gender-expansive students are safe and included in school settings.

As gender justice organizations, we collectively reject any attempt to limit Title IX’s protections by narrowly defining sex and reducing women and girls to their reproductive traits or anatomy.

Conditioning legal protections for students based on their reproductive traits or anatomy imposes harms that ultimately fall on the very people that the drafters of Title IX sought to protect—individuals who are subjected to unfair treatment in schools based on gender roles or stereotypes. 

Such an approach exacerbates gender stereotypes and encourages intrusive scrutiny and invasive sex testing of all students, with some policies calling for physical inspection of students’ reproductive anatomy. The harmful impacts of this scrutiny fall squarely on those who defy gender expectations—including women and girls who have short hair, are taller, or are more muscular—and disproportionately on Black and brown women and girls and gender-expansive students. It also disregards the experiences of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students, whose very existence refutes such narrow, outdated, and unscientific definitions of sex. 

We collectively reject this attempt to weaponize Title IX in order to exclude and discriminate against students for who they are. Instead, we must work to robustly fulfill Title IX’s promise that every student can learn in an environment free from sex-based discrimination, including harassment and violence. 

Signed:

• Equal Rights Advocates 
• National Women’s Law Center 
• Advocates for Youth 
• American Association of University Women (AAUW) 
• Clearinghouse on Women’s Issues 
• Feminist Majority Foundation 
• Just Solutions 
• Know Your IX 
• National Alliance to End Sexual Violence 
• Sexual Violence Prevention Association (SVPA) 
• Stop Sexual Assault in Schools 
• Victim Rights Law Center