White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back when Fox News and Fox Business correspondent Hillary Vaughn asked about transgender rights and school sports, and used the term “biological males” to ask for President Joe Biden’s view on the subject.
At Tuesday’s White House press briefing, Vaughn pushed Jean-Pierre for the president’s views on transgender children in sports by invoking his granddaughters:
HILLARY VAUGHN: Karine, on the question of a big election topic, transgender rights. Former Governor Nikki Haley and presidential candidate says, quote, “The idea that we have biological boys playing in girls sports, it is the women’s issue of our time.”.
Does the president agree that this is a women’s rights issue?
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: So we’ve talked about this many times. This is the Title IX specifically. Look, and again, we’ve talked about this multiple times. It’s a complicated issue and there are a wide range of views on this.
The Department of Education proposed a rule, as you know, that gives schools the flexibility to establish their own athletics policies. And so while establishing guardrails, right, to to prevent discrimination against transgender kids, and that is something that is incredibly important, that the president wants to make sure that we also do that as well.
So I’m just not going to get ahead of that. As I said, there’s a proposed rule for and Title nine on Title nine that the Department of Education has laid out. So I’m just not going to get ahead of that as it relates to Department of Education..
HILLARY VAUGHN: The president has granddaughters, does he care that girls are allowed to compete in sports without just a year of injury? Does he think it’s fair for girls to have to compete against biological males?
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: I just answered the question. It is a complicated issue. It is truly a complicated issue with a wide range of views, a wide range of views. There is no yes or no answer to this. It is complicated. There’s a rule that the Department of Education has put forward, and we’re going to let that process move forward. And it is again, we want to make sure that while we establish guardrails with this rule, that we also prevent discrimination as well against transgender kids. But again, a complicated issue with a wide range of views, and we respect that.
The AP Stylebook advises reporters to “Avoid terms like biological male, which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for assigned male at birth, and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”
As soon as he took office, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, and in June expressed full-throated support for trans teens at a global press conference.
And, as Jean-Pierre noted, Biden’s administration has proposed a change to Title IX that would “establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are. The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.”
Watch above via C-SPAN.
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