GOP Rep Asks Education Secretary If He’d Be OK With ‘My Homeboys’ Entering Bathroom With His Daughter If They Identified As Women

GOP Rep Asks Education Secretary If He’d Be OK With ‘My Homeboys’ Entering Bathroom With His Daughter If They Identified As Women

Reagan Reese on May 16, 2023

Republican Rep. Burgess Owens hypothetically asked if his “homeboys” could go into the bathroom with the Department of Education (ED) Secretary’s daughter if they felt they were women at a Tuesday Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing.

“Would you say as an 18-year-old young man that if me and some of my homeboys decided that we wanted to be women, would it be okay for me to go into your daughter’s bathroom and expose myself because I felt as if I was a woman?” Owens said. “Would that be fair to your daughter? By the way I have five daughters, so I am very passionate about the questions I asked you right now and I would think there would be no question in your mind as a father what these answers should be.”

In June 2022, the ED proposed changes to Title IX that would require every sex-separated space, such as school bathrooms and locker rooms, to accommodate individuals on the basis of gender identity.

“There’s nothing in our proposed Title IX regulations that determine how bathrooms should be used,” Miguel Cardona responded.

In January, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Florida school board’s policy that required students to use bathrooms on the basis of biological sex was not in violation of Title IX. The 4th circuit has ruled in the opposite direction, saying that school policies which separate bathrooms on the basis of biological sex violate transgender students’ rights.

In April, the ED released additional proposed changes to Title IX that would prohibit public K-12 schools and colleges from adopting a “one-size-fits-all-policy” which prohibits students from joining sports teams on the basis of gender identity.