Title IX Built Women’s Sports. Now, It’s Time for it to Change.

The law that transformed sports for women and girls is turning 50. 

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, as part of sweeping reforms to the education system. When the law passed, just over 300,000 young women played college and high school sports. Forty years later, six times as many women and girls were competing at the high school and college level. By 2016, one in every five girls in the United States played sports. The law essentially created women’s professional sports as we know it by building a pipeline of athletic opportunities.

But five decades later, the limits of Title IX have come into full focus. In the last two years, at least 18 states have introduced or passed laws to ban transgender and nonbinary students from competing in sports that align with their gender. Backers of the measures say that trans girls are a threat to women’s sports, and some of them are using Title IX to argue for that exclusion. As it currently exists, Title IX is a barrier to full trans inclusion in sports. 

When it was first passed, Title IX, which was modeled on parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, didn’t actually say anything about athletics. It was designed to address women being denied entry into educational institutions—as students, scholarship recipients, and faculty. To force schools to abide, Title IX barrs federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of sex.