Trump Tears Up Biden’s Title IX Rules, Deals Blow to Trans Movement

The Education Department has formally stripped Biden-era Title IX regulations out of the Code of Federal Regulations and restored the rules written during President Trump’s first term. The change took effect this week. The published text now treats sex, for Title IX purposes, as male or female at birth.

Biden’s 2024 rewrite had extended the law’s sex-discrimination shield to sexual orientation and gender identity in federally funded schools. It also pushed schools toward pronoun policies tied to gender identity and changed how campuses process harassment complaints.

A federal court struck those rules down in January 2025. The department then told schools it would enforce the 2020 Trump-era regulations instead. Monday’s action is the paperwork that makes the Federal Register match what the department has already been doing.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the rulemaking “clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration.”

She argued the published text now “faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent,” which she said should “reduc[e] confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions.” The last lawsuits over the Biden rule were dismissed in August, which the department cited as the opening it needed to delete the old language.

The move tracks a 2025 executive order directing agencies to recognize only male and female when they enforce sex-discrimination statutes. Title IX was written in 1972 to bar sex discrimination in education. The fight for the past several years has been whether “sex” in that statute includes gender identity.

Supporters of the Biden rule said transgender students needed explicit federal protection in bathrooms, locker rooms, pronouns, and sports. Opponents said the rule erased sex-based privacy and athletic categories for women and girls and forced schools to police speech.

McMahon cast the rollback as a defense of those categories. “We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls,” she said.

Schools have already been living under the 2020 framework since the court loss. The new publication matters because regulations outlast press releases. A future administration that wants the Biden interpretation back will have to write and defend a new rule, not simply leave the 2024 text on the books.

The political fight will not end with a Federal Register notice. States, districts, and athletic associations still set local policy. What changed this week is the federal baseline: the Education Department’s anti-discrimination rule now says sex means biology at birth.

That is the blow the headline points to. Title IX is again being enforced, in Washington’s published regulations, as a sex statute rather than a gender-identity statute.