Shiwali Patel — A Legal Defender of Trans and Women’s Rights
Assigned Media interviews Shiwali Patel, Title IX expert, Professor of Law, and Senior Director of Safe and Inclusive Schools at the National Women’s Law Center.
by Riki Wilchins
Assigned Media: You worked in the US Department of Education office for Civil Rights where you focused on civil rights protections, including for transgender students. You must not even have recognized it today when it's being wielded to disenfranchise transgender students.
Shiwali Patel: Yeah, I started in 2016, like a month before the Obama administration released its guidance addressing the rights of trans students under Title IX [which directed schools to respect their names and pronouns, allow correct bathroom use, and respond to anti-trans bullying]. Then that was the first guidance rescinded under the first Trump administration by Betsy DeVos [the incoming head of DOE) not even a month into the Trump administration. So the Obama guidance didn't even exist for a year. I still have a copy of it in my office, because when it was posted and finalized our team framed it. There were just a lot of people who are really proud of that finally coming out.
A/M: And now we're seeing Title IX wielded to remove people's civil rights rather than to extend them.
SP: Yeah, it's being weaponized, you know, which is like turning the law on its head to require discrimination which is just so awful. Just like they're weaponizing Title VI to get rid of DEI programs for students of color, that address issues of race.
A/M: You also were a community educator at DC Rape Crisis Center. And obviously HUD-funded shelters for battered women have now been encouraged to deny access to trans women. The right has done such a good job of fear mongering that the issue can leave ever those feminists who see themselves as both pro women’s and pro trans rights ambivalent, So it’s been doubly impressive seeing the National Women's Law Center right out in front of the issue saying, “No, trans women are women. They deserve to be in women's shelters when they're battered as well.” Have you had any problems defending that position with allied feminist organizations?
SP: The National Task Force to End Domestic and Sexual Violence released a statement—we worked in the background—and it calls on sexual assault organizations to condemn all this anti-trans rhetoric and come out in support of trans inclusion in all of these spaces. We felt that it was powerful to have these groups that specifically advocate for survivors and run shelters and do sexual assault work call out for the inclusion of trans women and girls in these spaces as well.
A/M: Feminist organizations appear to often be ambivalent on trans issues. Or at least pretty quiet. NWLC is definitely the feminist thought leader on trans issues right now on shelters, women’s prisons, and especially trans sports participation. Has that been difficult?
SP: We have received some hate and pushback, especially around sports. I was just talking to a colleague about why people are so angry about our work on sports. I explained how far right groups made this an issue to create a political wedge, to start chipping at other protections for trans people, to energize their base. It was a very strategic tactic to use trans students as political pawns. So we do receive some hate.
A/M: When I did a survey of 18 of the largest, most prominent women's and civil rights groups in the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights all of them made repeated statements in support of abortion and gay marriage. But for affirming care for trans kids it dropped to 44% and the volume fell by 85%. The only organization that made multiple statements was NWLC. And I think you’ve been equally strong on sports, where trans kids are attacked even if they’ve been on blockers since day one and have no arguable “advantages.”
SP: I don't think science is certain about the way our bodies work or not. It’s not so black and white—there's much more complexity. Some athletes are celebrated for their advantages, like swimmer Michael Phelps and his unusually long wingspan and basketball players who are unusually tall. This comes down to this hostility towards trans people. Meanwhile, other things that we know contribute enormously to athletic success are not mentioned, like socioeconomic factors, or the sort of specialized training and access to coaching and good facilities that some kids enjoy. The focus is on trans women and girls is not really about fairness. Plus these arguments around competitive fairness and injury prevention rely so much on gender-based stereotypes. There have even been high school wrestling competitions where cis girls have defeated cis boys. NWLC often points out the irony that underlying these stereotypes is the belief that women are just less athletic or strong and fit and able to compete—the same stereotypes we've been fighting for decades.
A/M: And those intersect with race, like those two women of color who won gold medals in the 2024 Paris Olympics—Algeria's Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-Ting—and they were still being attacked even after it was documented that they were both cisgender women. Which goes to your point that it's really about reinforcing white, middle class feminine norms and not really about level playing field fairness or even just trans women.
SP: Yeah, there is such a racialized piece to it. When you look at who has generally been targeted in professional sports it’s because they don't conform to someone's ideas of what a woman should look like, and then they're subjected to this sort of invasive scrutiny. Which also impacts cis women and girls, women and girls of color, and intersex women and girls too. It's something that we also pointed out.
One example that I've highlighted are two different incidents in Utah that involved cis white girl athletes and a school board member implied one was trans. And that invited a lot of harassment against her and her family. Parents of other girls who lost to this student complained to the school that she was trans and the school secretly investigated her. These attitudes open up all of this invasive scrutiny, allowing anyone to claim any of us are not women or girl enough to meet their definitions, feeding into the broader policing of gender. And that’s something we flag to bring in other women's rights groups, by showing all of these issues are connected.
A/M: Yeah, you and NWLC make the point that although trans women and girls are supposed to be forcing cis girls out of sports, in fact when we look at states where trans girls play sports, more, not fewer cis girls are playing as well. What’s keeping cis girls out of sports is not an uber-race of trans girls, it's lack of facilities, lack of support, lack of coaching.
SP: Absolutely. Trans women and girls have been playing sports for years. The Center for American Progress analyzed CDC data to arrive at that finding, and we have cited it over and over again to show the correlation between trans inclusion in sports and increased participation of all girls.
A/M: It’s a pretty remarkable stat. What I find so striking about the National Women's Law Center taking a lead on this issue is it’s one on which we’re the most underwater with the public. If you look at the polling, something like two thirds of the public believes that trans women in women’s sports is unfair, with even Democrats split pretty much 50/50. So NWLC picked the hardest bone to gnaw on.
SP: We felt we had to because of our deep history of advocating for women's rights and Title IX. In fact, NWLC was founded the year that Title IX was enacted. Our work has historically been around equal opportunity in sports for women and girls. So we feel like as the experts we have to push back against this narrative that banning trans women protects cis women and because a part of our community who are trans women and girls are being attacked. Something that I have really appreciated about working at the National Women's Law Center is how intersectional and inclusive we are in our advocacy. We really have been trying to organize other women's rights groups to speak up on the issue.
A/M: I noticed that NWLC was attacked by Martina Navratilova and the Women's Sports Policy Group. And it was this really detailed attack titled An Open Letter to the National Women’s Law Center.
SP: I laughed.
A/M: You laughed, why?
SP: Because it's, like, so ridiculous. All the resources and effort that they're putting into attacking the rights of trans women and girls, claiming it has nothing to do with women's rights But they're not really doing anything to defend the rights of women and girls. They claim that's what they're doing, but again, that's not what this is about. This is about attacking trans people to enforce this very narrow view of femininity and womanhood and it's really dangerous. They’re not solving any real issue, so why are they spending so many resources?
A/M: Your op-ed on the NWLC website has this wonderful title “Gender Justice and Sports Cannot Succeed Without Trans Women and Girls. So you’re going beyond the basic advocate for trans-inclusion by declaring that feminists cannot reach their goals unless there is trans-inclusion. Why not?
SP: Again, we have that CDC research that shows that when we have inclusive policies, we're creating a more affirming space that results in greater sports participation for all women and girls. Spaces where no one has to fit someone else's very narrow binary definitions of womanhood or sex.
And the flip side is, when you don’t have these kinds of affirming spaces, it invites scrutiny and this policing which we see being used against cis women and girls.
A/M: You also have this amazing close:
“[B]eing your true self, being your boundless, beautiful self, is the very definition of power. Because it’s the one thing they can’t control. The one thing they can’t contain. To them, our completeness, our complexity, our defiance of gender roles and expectations, is absolutely terrifying.”
SP: It’s like they’re trying to narrowly define us. That's part of their strategy too, to put us in these boxes that impose their ideas of how we should show up. So just being who we are is a threat to them.
A/M: You also have this lovely statement about the community:
“I am forever in awe of the beautiful resiliency of the trans community, of the incredible trans people and advocates who constantly push back against this hatred with joy, hope, and love.”
Thank you for joining us.
SP: Thank you.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.