Editorial: Title IX transparency protects students

Discrimination is best done in the light.

The federal government will soon lift the shade on schools hoping to avoid accommodating their LGBTQ+ students. On Thursday, the Department of Education announced that it will launch a database of colleges and universities which have applied for exemptions to Title IX regulations on religious grounds.

Under Title IX, federally funded education programs are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. But until now, students and parents have had no way to find out whether schools had applied for a waiver, leaving them to blindly enroll in hostile, unaccepting environments.

Students have a right to know whether they are welcome at the institutions they pay thousands of dollars to attend every year. Discovering that your campus wants you gone should be the least of any first-year’s worries.

While its best known impact is likely the requirement that male athletic groups have a female counterpart, Title IX’s umbrella of protection goes much further than sports. The anti-discrimination rules extend to university employment, admissions and housing policies, and they require the provision of non-discriminatory facilities like restrooms and locker rooms.

Despite always being able to file for exemptions to the rules on religious grounds, few schools took that route until 2014. That year, new federal guidelines expanded Title IX protections to transgender and gender nonconforming people. Fifty-six schools across 26 states have received these waivers since that extension, according to a December report by the Human Rights Campaign.

We should commend the federal government for making the distribution of these waivers more transparent, but simply creating a tool like this is pointless if nobody realizes it exists. Parents and high school guidance counselors helping young students must embrace consideration of these waivers, and the beliefs they represent, as a significant factor in college selections.

Furthermore, revealing the inner workings of a misguided system does not make it any more defensible.

Equal protection to all is not something we should be able to waive — it is supposed to be the guiding moral of our country. Providing institutions the opportunity to choose which civil rights protections are worth following does a disservice to the people these laws are meant to protect.

The benefits of making this system public are not just limited to the people Title IX waivers directly affect, though. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 54 percent of religious Americans say there is no conflict between their faith and homosexuality. People who are religious and would like to attend a school centered around their religion, but who are also accepting of people different than them, obviously exist. They, too, have the right to choose an environment that doesn’t pit their beliefs against each other.

Acceptance of trans and queer individuals is far from universal, and campus culture toward those communities can be hard to identify on a guided tour.

Making sure students vulnerable to prejudice know that a school has the legal right to discriminate against them is part of ensuring their safe, healthy future.