Right-wing media are fearmongering about Title IX protections for LGBTQ students that have been fortified under the Biden administration, claiming providing a safe environment for transgender children will mean the end of “traditional Christian values.” The latest outrage cycle has extended to every corner of the echo chamber, including viral anti-LGBTQ Twitter account “Libs of TikTok,” Fox News, the anti-abortion movement, and others. The right-wing fury toward Title IX protections has led to threats of violence, including a bomb threat that shut down a Wisconsin middle school forcing students to complete the year virtually.

These anti-LGBTQ smears are in response to changes the Biden administration has implemented to strengthen Title IX regulations.

In June 2021, the Biden administration reversed Trump-era Title IX changes that had removed prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Since then, the Department of Education has announced plans to codify safeguards for transgender students by revising the language in Title IX. The final rule isn’t expected to be in place until 2023, though conservative attorneys general have already protested the changes and are expected to sue the administration when the codification takes place. Additionally, in May, the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service announced it would be interpreting student protections “to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity” in both Title IX and the Food and Nutrition Act “to help ensure its programs are open, accessible and help promote food and nutrition security, regardless of demographics.”

In two instances over the past two months, right-wing media have attacked protections for LGBTQ students in schools by connecting the proposed Title IX revisions to the left’s “grooming project.”

The first, in March, was a Title IX complaint at Kiel Middle School in Wisconsin where the school district filed a harassment complaint against three students for using incorrect pronouns when addressing a nonbinary student. The complaint was first made public in May when conservative group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty — which previously investigated false claims of voter fraud in 2020 — went on a tour of right-wing media to sensationalize the investigation, setting off a full-blown outrage cycle. The national attention resulted in multiple bomb threats against the school and surrounding establishments, and Kiel Middle School eventually went virtual for the remainder of the year and dropped the investigation into the three boys. WILL celebrated the win and claimed, “The District may not be willing to admit it publicly, but it has recognized that it has no legal basis to demand that our clients refrain from ‘mispronouning’ other students.”

On May 13, the anti-LGBTQ, right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok tweeted a local news clip about the harassment complaint, saying, “This is unreal.” The clip received a million views and Libs of TikTok later tweeted that the school’s principal deleted their Twitter account. Right-wing news site Information Liberation used Libs of TikTok’s tweets to write up its own coverage of the story. The article was also posted on the InfoWars website.

Right-wing propaganda networks Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax also covered the story, along with various right-wing news sites that claimed the complaint against the boys was misuse of Title IX and a violation of the first amendment — a blatant attempt at riling up their audiences to the possibilities of Biden’s Title IX policies.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham had one of the accused students, his mother, and WILL’s Deputy Counsel Luke Berg on as guests during the May 16 edition of The Ingraham Angle. Ingraham asked if the complaint was something “typically covered by Title IX” to which Berg answered “not remotely,” adding, “Schools cannot and should not be forcing their preferred mode of speech on their students, especially minor students, this is basic First Amendment 101 stuff.” Ingraham also used this segment as a call to action for viewers to “get involved in their local school boards,” adding, “This stuff has to stop.”
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