After years of legal battles and courtroom defeats, the Department of Education has driven the final nail into the Biden administration’s radical rewrite of Title IX. The department announced Sept. 28 that it is formally rescinding the 2024 Biden-era regulations that redefined sex to include gender identity, restoring protections for women and girls that had stood for over half a century.
The move concludes a fight that saw seven circuit courts block the Biden rule and a federal judge strike it down entirely as an unlawful overreach of government authority.
“52 years of progress and sex-based protections have been erased with the stroke of a pen,” women’s sports advocate and former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines said when the Biden administration first issued its rule in April 2024. Her warning proved prescient as states across the country refused to comply.
The Biden regulations had rewritten the landmark civil rights law to include sexual orientation and gender identity, effectively allowing boys who claim to identify as girls to compete in girls’ and women’s sports at any school receiving federal funding. Twenty-six states saw the rule blocked by courts before it could take effect.
State education leaders didn’t wait for federal courts to act. Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley declared that the Biden administration’s changes “recklessly endanger students and seek to dismantle opportunities for females.” Education commissioners in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Florida joined the pushback, arguing the federal mandate overrode state laws and compromised student safety.
The legal pressure proved too much. In December 2024, just weeks before President Donald Trump began his second term, the Biden administration announced it would withdraw the rule, citing pending court cases and public comments received during the rulemaking process.
A month later, a chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky delivered the knockout blow, striking down and vacating the Biden regulations nationwide. The court ruled the Department of Education had exceeded its authority. The Trump-era Title IX framework, which maintained the biological definition of sex, remained in place.
President Trump moved quickly after taking office, issuing an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order defined sex as an immutable biological classification rather than a concept based on feelings or identity.
The Department of Education followed up by rescinding agreements with six school districts made under previous administrations regarding gender identity policies. Officials concluded that “Title IX is based on sex, and the schools did not violate the law.”
The 2020 Trump-era regulations are now formally back in the Code of Federal Regulations, ending any ambiguity about which rules govern America’s schools.
