Beth Ann Rosica, a West Chester mother of two teenage sons, is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania, claiming an agency overstepped when it unilaterally changed how a person’s sex is defined.
With little notice, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) changed its guidance regarding what sex means, declaring that rather than the biological definition, “under the PHRA may refer to sex assigned at birth, sexual orientation, transgender identity, gender transition, gender identity, and/or gender expression depending on the individual facts of the case.”
Rosica told DV Journal she discovered the change when looking into the Moms for Liberty case where a federal judge ruled in favor of the mother’s group to block former President Joe Biden’s Title IX changes and to keep boys out of girls’ restrooms and off girls’ teams.
She found out many Pennsylvania school districts were following the PHRC guidance.
“They still had policies that required them to follow PHRC regulations,” said Rosica. When she began digging into the PHRC regulations, she found that the agency had enacted them in 2023 under Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and “nobody in the state legislature was involved. And they basically expanded the definition of sex to include gender identity.”
And even though President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning males from playing on women’s sports teams, Pennsylvania school districts were continuing to allow it. They also allowed men and boys to use women’s locker rooms and restrooms.
Rosica joined other concerned parents—Aaron Bernstine, Jason Saylor, Barbara Gleim, and Alexandra Pasternak—and filed a petition against the governor and the PHRC, alleging the new guidance is a violation of the state constitution and the non-delegation doctrine. They’ve teamed up with the Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm, along with like-minded school districts South Side Area and Knoch.
Thomas King III of Dillon, McCandless, King, Coulter and Graham is a special counsel to the Thomas More Society in this case. He explained that while Trump’s order covers these schools, “we (also) have an underlying state regulation that is inconsistent with his order.”
“And that is being thrown in the face of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA), for example, that is being threatened with a lawsuit by the ACLU and others.” The PIAA, which governs school sports teams in Pennsylvania, had said it would follow Trump’s executive order.
“The particular state regulation was improperly adopted, should never have existed,” King told DV Journal. “When the Democrats in the legislature tried to amend Pennsylvania statutes — and over the past several years, they’ve tried on a number of occasions — every single time it failed. So, what’s happened here is they’ve circumvented the legislature, and they’ve tried to do it through administrative regulations from an unelected body appointed by the governor.”
And that is unconstitutional, said King, since “it’s the legislature that’s supposed to make the laws, not a group of unelected bureaucrats.”
Shapiro, answering a reporter’s question about this complaint at a press conference on Tuesday, said he hadn’t seen the suit, but mentioned that William Penn, “who founded this commonwealth as a place that would be warm and welcoming to all people. And I think it is my responsibility as someone who’s been passed down the torch of leadership from William Penn to make sure Pennsylvania remains a place that is warm and welcoming for all, including people in the LGBTQ+ community. I understand there are those who want to score a cheap political point by bullying a trans kid, by making it harder for people to make it harder to marry who they want. That’s just not who I am, and I’m sure that’s not who the vast majority of Pennsylvanians are.”
There is no connection between banning biological males from women’s sports, and same-sex marriage.
“I’ve worked hard for women to have equal rights,” Rosica said.
“And when we’re allowing boys to compete against girls in sports or invade their private spaces, I just think that is wrong, and I think that we have a moral responsibility to point this out and get these regulations overturned,” she said. “I believe they’re unconstitutional. I don’t think they had the authority to change them. They did it very quietly. Nobody was talking about this in 2023 when the regulations (were adopted).”
