By Tara Suter - 05/04/24

“Protecting our kids and women’s athletics is my duty,” Pillen said in a statement, according to The Nebraska Examiner. “The president’s new rules threaten the safety of women and their right to participate in women’s sports. Nebraska will not comply.”

The Biden administration unveiled a final set of changes to Title IX last month that add protections for transgender students to the federal civil rights law on sex-based discrimination. The changes will take effect in early August.

“These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming, and respect their rights,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

Pillen’s statement comes along with other Republican-led states pushing back against the new Title IX rules, including Florida, Louisiana, Wyoming, South Carolina and Oklahoma.

Last Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state “will not comply” with changes to the federal civil rights law in a video on the social platform X.

“Florida rejects [President Biden’s] attempt to rewrite Title IX,” DeSantis said. “We will not comply, and we will fight back.”

“We are not gonna let Joe Biden try to inject men into women’s activities,” DeSantis continued. “We are not gonna let Joe Biden undermine the rights of parents, and we are not gonna let Joe Biden abuse his constitutional authority to try to impose these policies on us here in Florida.”

In a statement to The Hill, the national press secretary for the LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign said that “already, politicians in Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere are leaping to oppose crucial protections for students in America’s schools.”

“These MAGA politicians are choosing theatrics and hateful rhetoric over protecting and furthering the needs of their state’s students,” Brandon Wolf said in the statement. “Refusing to comply with Title IX could have damaging consequences for schools, including significant loss in funding on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars — dollars that should be going to helping young people achieve academic excellence.

A U.S. Department of Education (DOE) spokesperson has also said in a statement to The Hill that the DOE “crafted the final Title IX regulations following a rigorous process to give complete effect to the Title IX statutory guarantee that no person experiences sex discrimination in federally funded education.”

“As a condition of receiving federal funds, all federally funded schools are obligated to comply with these final regulations and we look forward to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience.”

The Hill has reached out to Pillen’s office.