State Rep. Susan DuBose (R-Hoover) says she firmly believes the state of Alabama will win the fight against the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX. Biden’s version of the law bans discrimination and harassment based upon sexual orientation and gender identity, which many believe will negatively impact women’s sports.
Earlier this year, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed a preliminary injunction against the rule change.
DuBose discussed the issue Wednesday on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“So the problem with this rule change,” DuBose said, “which was just an egregious administrative overreach, there was no congressional vote involved, they simply chose with 1,500 word word rule change, to change the meaning of sex to include gender identity and gender orientation. And of course, that is just a self determined way of how you identify. And you have men just choosing to identify as women encroaching on women opportunities.”
DuBose highlighted some of the actions already taken by the Legislature to protect opportunities for women.
“We had already taken action in Alabama to protect our women athletes,” she explained, “and this would overturn what we have voted to do here in our state of Alabama, and that’s what’s so concerning. If we don’t follow along, if this succeeds in passing, and we don’t follow along as the state of Alabama, the federal government could withdraw all of our federal aid, our financial aid for Higher-Ed or K through 12.”
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“So we’ve had two different bills,” she added. “One, I think, in 2021 that protected female athletes in K through 12 grades. It just simply said in public schools, when women participate in sports or girls, you have to play according to your biological sex. So actually, men play with men. Women play with women. Girls with girls…boys with boys. And then in 2022 we passed another bill that took that on to the collegiate level. And that really is important because that’s when you get into protecting college athletes and scholarships and record setting and future opportunities. So we took early action, and we have protected women in our state, and it’s just egregious to think that the federal government could come in and threaten us in our state and our sovereignty by doing this.”
The lawmaker also thinks her colleagues in the Legislature will do whatever they can to help Marshall in this effort.
“We are going to continue in our state legislature to give our attorney general every tool in the toolbox to help fight this fight,” she said. “You’ve heard me talk about defining male and female in our state code. That’s important that we get that passed, and we will pass that this year. That will help him in his fight. It will help define what a male and female is, a man and woman, mother, father by the biological definition, so that our state institutions and state agencies will have that definition and can look to that as legislative backing when they want to enforce the meaning of those words in applications or anything within our state.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on X @Yaffee
