The Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX is officially dead. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education formally rescinded the 2024 rules that stretched the 1972 sex-discrimination law to cover sexual orientation and gender identity, and put the 2020 Trump-era rules back on the books.
The change took effect when it was published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, according to Education Week.
A Rule the Courts Had Already Buried
In practice, the Biden rule had been on life support for a long time. Education Week reports that federal courts vacated or blocked it at least 11 times.
In January 2025, a federal judge struck the regulation down nationwide just days before President Biden left office. Townhall dates that ruling to January 9, 2025. A second judge issued a similar ruling weeks after President Trump took office. By then, the new administration had already begun enforcing the 2020 rules again.
That is why the department says families won’t notice a sudden shift. “Nothing changes in practice for individual students, parents, and teachers,” the department said, as quoted by Education Week. It added that the rules published this week are the ones it has been enforcing since January 31, 2025.
What Monday’s action does is clean up the rulebook. The 2024 language is now formally removed from the Code of Federal Regulations, so schools, lawyers and states can no longer point to it.
What the Biden Rule Did
Title IX bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money. For five decades, it has been the law behind equal opportunity for girls and women in classrooms and athletics.
The 2024 rewrite redefined “sex” discrimination to include gender identity and sexual orientation and folded in “sex stereotypes.” Critics say it also lowered the bar for what counted as harassment. The restored 2020 rules return to protections based on biological sex, Townhall reported.
What Officials Said
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the action “restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump administration,” according to Education Week.
She was blunter elsewhere. “Girls’ sports are for girls, and boys’ sports are for boys,” McMahon said, as quoted by Townhall. She added that Title IX “isn’t a political weapon for the radical left.”
Sarah Parshall Perry of the group Defending Education called the move “a long-awaited and much-needed regulatory move.” She noted that Democratic-led states that had leaned on the Biden rule to justify gender-identity policies “no longer have that cover,” Education Week reported.
Not everyone agreed. The National Women’s Law Center warned the change “significantly weakens protections against sexual harassment in education.”
Our Take: Congress Writes the Laws
What follows is our view, not reporting.
The Biden rule was a textbook case of government by regulation. Congress wrote Title IX in 1972 to protect women and girls. It never voted to redefine “sex.” An agency did that on its own, and it took at least 11 court rulings to stop it.
That’s not how self-government is supposed to work. If Americans want to change a landmark civil rights law, they can ask their elected representatives to do it, in public, with a recorded vote. Letting unelected officials rewrite the meaning of a word, then threatening schools’ federal funding if they don’t comply, puts enormous power in the hands of people no voter can remove.
The practical stakes are real, too. Girls who train for years deserve a fair shot at a spot on the team, a place on the podium and the scholarships that come with them. Parents deserve to know which rules their local school follows without reading a stack of court orders. A single, clear rule grounded in the law’s original text serves both.
The critics’ concern about harassment deserves a straight answer. The 2020 rules now back on the books are the same rules schools have operated under since early 2025, and the department says nothing changes in practice for students. Clarity and fairness are not at odds.
What’s Next
This isn’t the last word. Education Week reports that the department is working on a broader regulation that would state outright that Title IX protections do not extend to discrimination claims based on gender identity. That rule would line up with President Trump’s executive order on protecting women from what it calls “gender ideology extremism.”
Expect that proposal to draw heavy public comment and, very likely, more lawsuits. For now, schools, parents and students have one set of rules, and it is the one rooted in the law Congress actually passed.
Sources
- Education Week: Ed. Dept. officially kills Biden rule that added LGBTQ+ protections to Title IX
- Townhall: Department of Education rescinds Biden’s Title IX rewrite