A federal district judge in Kentucky has struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation that added sexual orientation and transgender status to the definition of sexual discrimination protections.
The decision—the first one to fully consider the merits of the Title IX rule—appears to apply nationwide, which would mean the end of the highly controversial regulation because the incoming Trump administration seems unlikely to appeal.
The ruling—issued Jan. 9—is also the first time a court has found that the regulation interpreted by some as requiring teachers to address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns violates the First Amendment.
If the regulation is indeed invalidated nationwide, that would also erase provisions providing greater protections to pregnant students and new requirements for sexual harassment complaints as well as the broader definition of sexual discrimination under Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity. (The Biden administration recently shelved a separate pending regulation on sports participation by transgender students.)
The decision is the latest in the multi-front legal battle over the Biden-era Title IX rule change. Efforts to both expand and restrict policies related to transgender students in schools remain divisive political fights that animated local, state, and national campaigns and elections. Roughly 3.3 percent of high school students identify as transgender, and 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity, according to federal data released last fall.
Several other federal district courts and appeals courts had issued or upheld preliminary injunctions blocking the 2024 regulation, and the U.S. Supreme Court last August rejected the Biden administration’s request to narrow the injunctions. The result has been that the rule is blocked in 26 states and at some schools in other states.
Judge agrees with plaintiffs that rule would compel teachers to use students’ preferred names and pronouns
Judge Danny C. Reeves of the U.S. District Court in Lexington, Ky., who had issued one of those injunctions last year in a challenge brought by five states and a Christian educators’ group, on Jan. 9 delivered his final opinion striking down the regulation finalized by the Biden administration in 2024. That regulation effectively extended the scope in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars federally funded educational institutions from discriminating on the basis of sex, to include gender identity.
“[E]xpanding the meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ turns Title IX on its head,” said Reeves, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
Reeves said the U.S. Department of Education relied too heavily in the regulation on the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., which held that the main federal employment discrimination law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, covered sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace.
“The department reads Bostock far too broadly by importing its holding into the context of Title IX,” Reeves said in Tennessee v. Cardona. “The [Supreme] Court in Bostock expressly limited its holding to Title VII.”
The challenge was led by Tennessee (though filed in Kentucky) and joined by Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. Christian Educators Association International intervened in the suit to focus on provisions of the regulation that it contends would require teachers to use the names and pronouns preferred by transgender students, even when it went against the teachers’ religious beliefs.
The Education Department did not agree with that group’s argument, but Reeves agreed that “the plaintiffs reasonably fear that teachers’ (and others’) speech concerning gender issues or their failure to use gender-identity-based pronouns would constitute harassment under the Final Rule.”
“Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves said.
Court cases continue as Donald Trump set to return to office
The decision comes less than two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office. He has criticized the Biden Title IX regulation and pledged he would reverse it, but that would take time.
That has led some legal advocates to observe that continuing the legal challenges to the regulation may be the best way for opponents to bring about its demise.
Both Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, and Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization involved in several challenges to the regulation, including representing the Christian educators group, issued statements praising the decision.
“Because the Biden rule is vacated altogether, President Trump will be free to take a fresh look at our Title IX regulations when he returns to office,” Skrmetti said.
Kristen Waggoner, the CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom, said, “The Biden administration’s radical attempt to redefine sex not only tossed fairness, safety, and privacy for female students out the window, it also threatened free speech and parental rights.”
There was no immediate reaction from the Biden administration. Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, which supports the Biden Title IX rule, said in a statement that the new decision “displays extraordinary disregard for students who are most vulnerable to discrimination and are in the most need for federal protections under the Title IX rule.”
