It’s no secret that many of our institutions have gone, well, bonkers, and nowhere more so than in the gender arena. As Heather Mac Donald notes, not only does the Boy Scouts now employ a chief diversity officer and vice president of diversity and inclusion and requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in DEI, the group began to admit girls to its program in 2019 and changed the name of that program from Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been removed from the organization’s promotional materials, replacing it with “youth.”

Just as wacky, a federal appeals court recently affirmed the decision of a lower court ruling on a Massachusetts school that told a 7th-grade student he could not wear a T-shirt, which reads, “There are only two genders.” Thus, the administrators at John T. Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, MA were allowed to tell 12-year-old Liam Morrison to remove his shirt because it was “offensive to gender-expansive youth.”

In April, the Biden administration subjected the country to a major Title IX revision. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights created Title IX in 1972 to protect people from discrimination “based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.” However, the new version has been expanded and requires that schools treat students who suffer or claim to suffer from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. It also stipulates that male students who identify as female must be allowed access to facilities designated for females, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and be allowed to participate in women’s sports and organizations.

The new version, which was set to take effect on August 1, also specifies that teachers and students must refer to a gender dysphoric child by their preferred pronouns and alternative name and that no formal documentation is required to affirm gender identity.

But the rewrite was a bridge too far for much of the country. In fact, by mid-June, 26 states—predominantly red or purple—sued, declaring, among other things, that the rule violates women’s rights. By allowing nonbinary and transgender people to benefit from Title IX protections, the lawsuits argue the department is stripping away protections from women.

By the beginning of July, three judges ruled against the updated Title IX. On July 2, federal Judge John Broomes of the U.S. District Court of Kansas, which covers that state as well as Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming, joined two other federal judges who also granted injunctions halting enforcement of the Title IX revision, covering the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Idaho, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia.

On July 11, the U.S. House of Representatives got involved, voting 210-205 along party lines to pass a resolution invoking the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn the Title IX rule and give federal lawmakers 60 congressional days to rescind or approve it. The resolution’s passage immediately sparked an outcry from those who favored the rule.

Parent groups have also joined the battle. Moms for Liberty, a conservative group that advocates for parental rights, filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Education to halt the new Title IX rule from taking effect. As a result, a federal judge ordered that the revision would be blocked from any school with a child whose mother belongs to the organization.

A 63-page list was submitted last week to the Kansas District Court by the state’s Attorney General Kris Kobach, containing K-12 schools with a Moms for Liberty parent. The number added up to over 2,000 schools across 45 states.

Additionally, the Washington Parents Network is filing for a preliminary injunction against the Title IX rule change and asking the court to order Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, as well as the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association, to comply with Title IX by prohibiting biological males from using girls’ bathrooms or locker rooms or participating in girls’ sports.

On July 24, the U.S. Department of Education released resources for schools and stakeholders on implementing the revision. However, they don’t apply to the states and schools with injunctions.

The rewrite was indeed rolled out on August 1, but it affects less than half of students in the U.S. Nevertheless, a chipper U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called the new rule a major milestone and the “culmination of a lengthy and thorough process that included unprecedented public input.” With no sense of irony, he added, “I want to loudly and unapologetically reject any efforts to politicize Title IX or efforts to sow more division in our country. These rules are about living up to America’s highest ideals.”

Then, in a significant move on August 16, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked requests by the federal government to vacate injunctions over the Title IX update. The 5-4 SCOTUS ruling, which upheld the lower courts’ actions, means that the injunctions preventing the implementation of the new rule in 26 states will be allowed to remain in effect until the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals takes up the case in October.

To put all this into perspective, 5.1% of adults younger than 30 claim to be transgender or nonbinary, according to a Pew Research poll, and this social contagion is being used as a political cudgel by many with a perverse agenda. In reality, a staggering 99.4% of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group. The 0.6% of the adult population who are truly gender dysphoric—a condition that causes extreme distress—certainly deserve empathy and respect.

Also of note, Brown University physician and researcher Lisa Littman released a study in 2018 that showed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in young people may be driven by “social and peer contagion.” She stresses that nearly 70 percent of the teenagers were involved with a peer group in which at least one friend had identified as transgender.

Yes, the leap in numbers is a classic case of social contagion that is reinforced by a compliant mainstream media. It’s the “in” thing, like owning a hula hoop, lava lamp, or Cabbage Patch doll. These things may have cost a few bucks at the time, but they were not going to damage anyone’s life and cause societal upheaval.

Twelve-year-old Liam Morrison is right. There are only two genders. Maybe one day, our institutions will acknowledge this reality.

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Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.