The U.S. Department of Education on Monday formally rescinded the 2024 Title IX regulations of President Joe Biden’s administration that had interpreted the statute’s protections to prohibit discrimination based on students’ sexual orientation and gender identity.
In their place, the department formally reinstated 2020 regulations from President Donald Trump’s first administration, which will appear in the Sept. 29 Federal Register and take immediate effect without a notice-and-comment period.
As a practical matter, the status quo is not changing. The second Trump administration in January 2025 informally returned to enforcing the 2020 rules after the Biden regulations, which were briefly in effect for some states and school districts but not others because of legal challenges, were struck down for good by a federal district judge in the final days of Biden’s term. A second federal judge issued a similar ruling just weeks after Trump took office.
Title IX is the landmark 1972 federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in any school or educational program that receives federal funding.
“Nothing changes in practice for individual students, parents, and teachers,” the Education Department said in a fact sheet. “The rules promulgated today are the rules the department has been enforcing since January 31, 2025.”
But this week’s action removes the 2024 rules from the Code of Federal Regulations, “so schools, students, and families can easily identify the Title IX regulations that are actually in effect,” the fact sheet says.
The department’s introduction to the regulation notes that “this final action does not reopen debate on the 2020 Rule or the 2024 Rule. It does not assess the department’s policy preferences as between those two rules. It does not choose between those two rules,” but merely updates the federal regulatory code.
Left unsaid is that a new presidential administration with its own policy preferences would have to go through the full regulatory process to change the reinstated 2020 Title IX rule—proposing a new regulation, then accepting public comments before finalizing a new rule.
The new rulemaking “restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump administration,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.
The 2020 rules notably had added more due-process protections for students accused of sexual harassment, an issue especially salient at the college level. The now-reinstated rules also lack the explicit anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students the Biden administration attempted to add by arguing that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination extended to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The National Women’s Law Center warned the department’s move “significantly weakens protections against sexual harassment in education.” It pointed to a case of alleged sexual assault of a woman by fraternity members at Cornell University that has been in the news. A state prosecutor has reopened the investigation of the 2024 incident, which Cornell said in a statement that it supports notwithstanding its own Title IX investigation that resulted in a range of sanctions for the accused students.
“The Cornell University case is a devastating example of why robust federal Title IX enforcement matters,” Shiwali Patel, the law center’s senior director of education justice, said in a statement. “Sexual harassment and assault continue to be pervasive in schools and, to the fullest extent possible, we should be working to enforce the laws that protect student survivors of sexual violence. Yet, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the Trump administration have decided to ignore what survivors need, instead weaponizing Title IX to attack trans students.”
Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, a legal group that supports the Trump administration’s views on Title IX, said Monday’s move was “a long-awaited and much-needed regulatory move by this administration.”
She said the new rulemaking “is especially consequential” for Democratic-led states “that claimed legal cover for their gender-inclusive policies because the Biden regulation remained active in the Federal Register, even though federal courts enjoined or vacated the rule no fewer than 11 times. Those states no longer have that cover.”
The Education Department’s press release highlighted enforcement actions during the second Trump administration aimed at states and school districts over policies the department views as supportive of transgender female athletes and gender-transitioning students and violations of Title IX.
The 2020 Title IX rules did not extensively address the participation of transgender female athletes on girls’ and women’s teams.
The department is believed to be working on a more comprehensive regulation that explicitly states Title IX’s protections don’t apply to gender identity-based discrimination and aligns with a presidential executive order on “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” The department, under Trump, has argued that Title IX requires that schools exclude transgender athletes from girls’ teams.
