The Miami Herald sets the table:

Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, a Hialeah Republican, called the proposed Title IX rule changes an “overreach.”

“This is a sad, pathetic attempt from a completely inept administration to force their woke worldview on the rest of us. Since Joe Biden can’t get Congress or the Supreme Court to rubber-stamp his radical gender ideology, he’s resorted to bullying America’s students through the federal bureaucracy. Good luck – this won’t fly in Florida,” Diaz said in a statement Thursday.

Diaz added that the state will “never allow boys to play in girls’ sports.”

“We will fight this overreach tooth and nail,” Diaz said. “And we will stop at nothing to uphold the protections afforded women under Title IX.”

The Biden administration is, in fact, on a collision course with 20 (and counting; North Carolina is on the clock) states that ban students from competing outside their biological birth gender — a position, according to the latest polling available, supported by a stout majority of Americans.

Not that the majority view on any issue is always the correct (or even enduring) one. Separate-but-equal once struck most Americans as reasonable, as did certain marriage prohibitions, so there you go.

Nonetheless, when thinking about the politics of the thing, especially as we gear up for a presidential election year, it’s useful to know where Americans’ sensibilities reside.

And we know roadkill when we smell it.

At first blush, Biden’s Department of Education would appear to be charting a compromise course. 

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX “when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they [say they — Ed.] are,” the U.S. Department of Education said in a statement.

The department will provide schools with a framework for eligibility considerations. The proposed new rule now enters a 30-day comment period.

“The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation,” the department said. “The proposed rule would provide schools with a framework for developing eligibility criteria that protects students from being denied equal athletic opportunity, while giving schools the flexibility to develop their own participation policies.”

Sound reasonable? Oh, please. The latter sentence is nothing but a mountain of mischief. You already can hear lawyers sharpening their climbing axes to a summit where thousands of Lia Thomas admirers and followers may bloom, at the expense of future Riley Gaineses.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona already gave away the game: “Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” Cardona said in a statement.

What Biden proposes, then, is a deceitful smoke-and-mirrors “compromise” that will further politicize an already overheated issue. Directing school administrators to split countless babies — usually in public forums — promises to endlessly burnish narratives on every side of the transathlete spectrum. No matter how schools come down, someone is going to launch litigation.

Who wins? In the short term, only professional fundraisers and, as mentioned, legal firms. That said, the fact that leftists are dead set on shoehorning ersatz females into girls’ and women’s sports creates intriguing common ground for women’s activists and traditional conservatives.

Donna de Varona, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming and a member of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, said her hope is to find a “nuanced approach” to finding space for transgender athletes while allowing for Title IX to make sure girls and women have “fairness, opportunity and safety.”

“There’s plenty of room. … Why does it have to be in the women’s category? We’re already being compromised in our reproductive rights and now we have the other spectrum with sports,” de Varona said in a phone interview.

Meanwhile, Thursday, 1,100 miles up Interstate 75,  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — still the unannounced Republican candidate for president — mentioned the transathlete ban he pushed while ticking through a list of conservative priorities for a crowd of 600 reading enthusiasts in Midland, Mich.

On education, DeSantis celebrated Florida’s controversial law … that forbids teachings on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3 and could soon expand to all grades.

The governor also told the Midland crowd of a law he signed that requires student athletes play on teams according to the sex they were assigned at birth.

“(Schools) should not be used – with your tax dollars supporting it – to advance the left’s political ideology or political agenda,” he said.

Which, quite clearly, is precisely what the Biden Department of Education proposes to do. Battle lines are being drawn.