MICHAEL CHAMBERLAIN: DEI Tide Has Turned, And Somebody Should Tell US Educators

Word has it the International Olympic Committee may establish an official policy barring biological males from competing in women’s sports ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. That would be a hopeful sign society is finally ready to ditch this unfair and dangerous practice.

After President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order banning men from women’s sports prompted the U.S. Olympic Committee to do the same in its competitions, some believe the shift is imminent. Other major countries’Olympic bodies have already ruled against allowing biological males into female competitions.

That a major international sports body is apparently willing to ditch it indicates we may be turning the corner on the transgender ideology of the last 10 years. Even more evident that people are jumping off the bandwagon, when Axiosasked a number of prominent progressive politicians if a man can become a woman, almost all ducked the question and the only straight answer was one “no.” 

However, there is one group unwilling to give up this ideology. It includes the people many Americans entrust their children to for eight hours a day.

In the past year, U.S. educators have demonstrated they are willing to violate state law, Title IX, and risk losing federal funding to give biological males access to female-specific facilities and sports competitions, among other possibly illegal DEI practices.

Several undercover videos published by Accuracy in Media (AIM) in 2025 revealed that administrators in Ohio school districts, for instance, were using deception to get around that state’s law prohibiting boys participating on sports teams and using facilities designated for young women and girls.

A staff member at one Ohio school told AIM investigators posing as parents that the school would look the other way if a biological male enrolled in school sports as a female athlete.

“In my opinion, if we’re enrolling as a female, she plays sports as a female,” the official said, also claiming it would be “discrimination” if the school exposed the student’s biological sex.

An employee at another district in the Buckeye state told undercover investigators that the school staff would let it slide if students misrepresented their biological sex to get on the female sports teams. “You know, there’s a weird kind of culture where it’s almost like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” the official said, adding the district “is pretty accepting” and that staff wouldn’t even mind if a male student fabricated “female” on the child’s birth certificate.

School leaders in two other Ohio districts were exposed by undercover videoslast year saying they had no problem hiding the true identity of male students who want to access girls’ spaces at school.

These revelations prompted my organization, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), tofile complaints with the Trump administration. PPT argued that these schools are “demonstrating deliberate indifference to harassment” and are “openly violating Ohio law and the principles communicated in Title IX” and the executive order.

This continued disregard for state law and Title IX by these schools shows how pervasive this and similar ideologies are in U.S. education. Staff at other school districts have likewise demonstrated how far they will go to keep these initiatives alive even when the law forbids it.

PPT filed a 2025 complaint against Burlington School District(BSD) in Vermont after educators were exposed attempting to get around federal law barring public institutions from using Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in their hiring practices. BSD employed some rhetorical sleight of hand with its race-based hiring initiative to make it less detectable by authorities.

Parents with public school students in rural areas shouldn’t feel safe from the woke agenda creeping into their schools. While working at the Department of Education during the first Trump term, I found the number of educators in rural areas who subscribed to discriminatory DEI and like policiesto be fewer than urban districts, but not by much.

The unfortunate truth is that too many of those we trust our children’s education to hew to the same fads and groupthink, regardless of prevailing opinion in their particular communities. Even worse, when these beliefs clash with the law and common sense, their reflex is to hide what they are doing, rather than re-evaluate and course correct.

While it’s true that more and more people are waking up and rejecting the idea that males should be allowed on women’s sports teams and in girls’bathrooms, the fact that America’s education leaders will go to such lengths to protect these efforts means they will remain a considerable cultural force unless they’re exposed.

If the American public wants to protect women’s sports and eradicate discrimination, they need to be vigilant for the undercover agendas that faculty members and administrators are pursuing. It appears that simply changing the law is not enough to deter them from continuing to indoctrinate and endanger our kids.

Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Daieuxetdailleurs, CC 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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