Late last week, the Biden administration released its highly anticipated updated rules for the 1972 Title IX amendments to the Civil Rights Act, which protects people from sex-based discrimination in education. Arguably the most consequential and, judging from social media, most controversial of the updated rules was that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on “gender identity.” On a naïve level, it sounds like a good thing: discrimination is bad, after all. But not in this case. The term “gender identity” changes the meaning of the category “women” to include men and boys who have decided to call themselves women. In effect, the new rules negate the legislation they were supposed to uphold.

How did we get to the point that the federal government now requires schools, from K–12 all the way up to higher ed, to allow males to use women’s and girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers—and perhaps soon to play on women’s sports teams—or else lose funding? The primary culprit here is the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the regulatory office overseeing Title IX compliance. The OCR wields policy along the lines of Humpty Dumpty’s decree: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”