Trump’s Ed Department Ends Biden’s Title IX Social Experiment

The U.S. Department of Education announced Friday that it has ended the Biden administration’s dangerous sexual and social experiments on America’s school children by reinstating the first Trump administration’s rules governing Title IX.

The Biden administration’s Title IX overhaul was poised to do significant damage to schools and students — K-12 through college and throughout the country — but was halted in multiple states until it was ultimately thrown out nationwide for attempting to change the definition of sex to include claims of multiple genders.

“The Biden Administration’s failed attempt to rewrite Title IX was an unlawful abuse of regulatory power and an egregious slight to women and girls,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a Friday press release. “Under the Trump Administration, the Education Department will champion equal opportunity for all Americans, including women and girls, by protecting their right to safe and separate facilities and activities in schools, colleges, and universities.”

Biden’s Title IX, as Trainor noted, ripped apart civil rights protections for women and girls in school. It would have effectively turned separate facilities, such as restrooms and locker rooms, into civil rights violations if they remained off-limits to individuals of the opposite sex (so long as these individuals claimed an incoherent gender identity). Obviously, this put girls at risk every day in school, as boys would be allowed to enter their private spaces and make them feel uncomfortable. As Americans found out in 2021, this also opened the door for sexual violence against girls. The rewrite would also have forced girls to sleep in the same rooms as boys on events like overnight field trips.

“President Biden’s dangerous Title IX rule was a serious cause for concern for parents, putting young girls in harm’s way on a daily basis,” American Parents Coalition Executive Director Alleigh Marré told The Federalist. “Thanks to President Trump, sanity has been restored and parents can have the peace of mind that, when their kids go to school, they won’t be sharing sensitive spaces with biological males.”

But Biden’s Title IX did not stop at blocking sex-segregated spaces. It also shredded the civil rights protections of students on college campuses accused of sexual harassment under Title IX and forced students and teachers to comply with using “preferred pronouns” claimed by students. As a U.S. district court judge ruled earlier this month, such a requirement is not permitted by the First Amendment.

The Trump administration’s Friday move, as articulated in a “Dear Colleague” letter and “effective immediately,” reverses the Biden-era Title IX overhaul, citing the Kentucky district court ruling throwing out the entire Biden rule as well as a Trump executive order eradicating “gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.”

In [the Office for Civils Right’s] view The Eastern District of Kentucky’s decision expressed the proper textual and original meaning of Title IX, and it correctly repudiated the 2024 Title IX Rule’s expanded “meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity,’” which, if left in place, would “turn[] Title IX on its head.”4 Likewise, the court rejected the 2024 Title IX Rule’s statement that discrimination on the basis of sex also includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, and sexual orientation.

The letter states that “open Title IX investigations” started under Biden’s 2024 rule “should be immediately reoriented to comport fully with the requirements of the 2020 Title IX Rule.”

The 2020 rules, now back in effect, protected women’s spaces, including in sports, and ensured that all parties in a sexual harassment claim on a college campus were afforded equal due process rights.

Prior to 2020, and reinstated by Biden in 2024, those accused of sexual assault were subjected to what many referred to as “kangaroo courts,” where the adjudication process was stacked heavily in favor of the accuser, making it extremely difficult for the accused to prove innocence.

Biden’s rules undermined a presumption of innocence, as is normally the hallmark of the American justice system, and could block the accused from seeing the full breadth of “evidence” weighed against them or from cross-examining the accuser.

While the “Dear Colleague” letter does not carry the same weight as law, it is unclear how, if appealed, proceedings surrounding the Kentucky injunction on the Biden rule will fare.

“Now wiped from the books, the Biden administration’s fatally flawed Title IX regulations prized gender identity over biological fact, hurt women and girls, and undermined free speech, religious freedom, and due process on campus,” a statement from the Defense of Freedom Institute, whose founders served in the Education Department during the first Trump administration, said.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.