USA Today columnist Nancy Armour accused the Heritage Foundation of “coming for” Title IX on Thursday, shortly after facing backlash for her .
Armour cited the conservative think tank report titled “Title IXs Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity,” released earlier this month, which criticized the modern application of the 1972 federal civil rights law barring sex-based discrimination in education activities or programs that receive federal funding.
The report’s author, Scott Yenor, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s American Citizenship Initiative, wrote that stricter interpretations of the law have enforced rigid equality in school sports to the detriment of both male and female student athletes.
“Title IX evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates,” the Heritage Foundation report read. “The result has been two systemic distortions: a prejudice in favor of a male-normed competitive model for womens sports and a prejudice against mens non-revenue programs.”
Armour claimed that this signaled the organization is seeking to remove protections for female sports and roll back women’s rights.
“Our bodies, our self-confidence, our independence â theyre not going to stop until women have the same rights and opportunities they did before the 1970s. Which were almost none,” Armour wrote.
The USA Today columnist dismissed the idea that the Heritage Foundations efforts “will go nowhere” despite the law’s widespread support.
“Project 2025 has done too much damage already not to take the threat to Title IX seriously. The Heritage Foundation wants a United States that reflects their White, Judeo-Christian and heteronormative ‘values,’ and is steadfastly working to eliminate anything that deviates from them,” Armour wrote.
She added, “Its also about enforcing a specific definition of femininity. It started with banning transgender women from sports. Now that thats been accomplished, the Heritage Foundation and their ilk are going to try and make the rest of us women conform.”
reached out to the Heritage Foundation for comment.
Though Armour suggested that the Heritage Foundation is seeking to eliminate Title IX, Yenor instead argued in favor of reforms to the law that focused less on proportionality in male-dominated sports and more on opportunities for female-centric athletics such as cheerleading, gymnastics and volleyball.
“Equality under Title IX does not require identical outcomes or the erasure of sex differences. It requires opportunity rooted in human nature that will reveal genuine differences between the sexes. Recovering an approach that accommodates the partly natural, partly cultural differences between the sexes can sustain vibrant womens sports, protect and perhaps expand male opportunities, and contribute to a healthier, more humane social order,” Yenor wrote.
Armour’s latest column came after she received backlash for accusing Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark of putting Black and queer WNBA players “in danger” by flopping and berating court officials.
“It shouldnt need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed,
