PROF. GARRETT: California’s reckless defiance of Title IX
In California, community colleges are pretending Trump's new rules banning men in women's sports don’t apply to them.
A former tenured professor at Bakersfield College, Matthew Garrett is the founder of Renegade Institute for Liberty, an organization dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity. He launched the California Curriculum Center shortly after retiring from academia to offer nonpartisan curricula for independent educators and charter schools.
For more than 50 years, Title IX has protected women’s opportunities in education and sports. The rule is simple: schools that receive federal funding must offer equal opportunities based on biological sex. That’s why men’s and women’s sports are separate—so female athletes have a fair chance to compete on an even playing field. Most states follow this rule without issue, but in California, community colleges are refusing to comply.
For the last four years, the Biden administration refused to enforce this simple standard. Instead, his administration pressured schools to allow biological men to compete in women’s sports if they imagined themselves as female.
In the simplest terms, Biden’s administration directed universities to interpret self-imagined gender as a protected class, fundamentally undermining the law’s original intent. Government officials treated this as settled policy and forced this distortion of Title IX onto educational institutions nationwide.
When Trump took office, his administration reversed Biden’s policy and restored Title IX’s original intent. The message was clear: schools must separate sports based on biological sex to protect fairness and safety.
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Trump isn’t alone in this stance. Earlier this year, a federal court struck down Biden’s Title IX reinterpretation, calling it an “attempt to bypass the legislative process and completely transform Title IX.” The law, as written, does not grant the president or academic institutions the authority to erase sex-based protections.
In compliance with the court and Trump administration guidance, the nation’s largest athletic association, the NCAA, immediately updated its policies. Other institutions across the country followed suit.
But in California, community colleges are pretending the rules don’t apply to them.
Just hours after Trump’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued a warning about enforcement, California Community Colleges Athletic Association (3C2A) Executive Director Jennifer Cardone reassured leadership that “until otherwise notified, 3C2A policy remains in place.” In other words, California’s community college athletic programs received a direct warning from the federal government—and decided to ignore it, at least for the moment.
A month and a half later, 3C2A’s Gender Equity Resource website is still pushing “Civil Rights for Transgender Students” with arguments drawn from Biden-era guidance—the same guidance that Trump and the courts have already struck down.
This refusal to follow federal law isn’t an isolated incident within California colleges. In response to OCR warnings about racially discriminatory programs that Biden’s team also ignored, California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian instructed colleges to continue programs that may violate federal civil rights law. She encouraged system-wide noncompliance, as if daring the federal government to take action. That same defiant attitude is now shaping the associated 3C2A’s stance on Title IX.
So why are Christian and Cardone refusing to follow basic civil rights law? How can they ignore federal court rulings and a formal warning letter from the current administration?
The answer is simple: they see the state as a tool for their personal politics—and they’re willing to risk millions in taxpayer dollars, student scholarships, and the physical safety of female athletes in pursuit of their own agendas. It’s reckless virtue signaling at the taxpayer expense.
The Office of Civil Rights is already investigating the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school athletics in the state, but the 3C2A has managed to evade that level of scrutiny by refraining from issuing a public statement. Still, they quietly advance the same unlawful position.
In the end, this tactic leaves individual colleges exposed to lawsuits. Colleges and universities that follow the 3C2A’s lead will find themselves abandoned when it comes time to pay the legal fees.
California’s leaders may believe they can defy federal law indefinitely, but sooner or later, reality will catch up. When it does, the public will have to ask: why were these schools willing to gamble taxpayer money, legal standing, and student safety on a political agenda they knew had no legal future?
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
