Title IX and Trump 2.0: No More Radicalism Masquerading as Civil Rights

Last week, the Trump Administration dropped Biden’s appeal of a July Oklahoma court ruling on Title IX. The ruling had stopped Biden’s April 2024 Title IX regulation from taking effect, joining several other courts that also found the rule both illegal and unconstitutional since it gutted due process, chilled free speech, and imposed fringe sexual politics on schools, including allowing men on women’s teams and in women’s locker rooms and bathrooms.

In January, a Kentucky court went further than the one in Oklahoma, finding the Biden rule so unlawful that the court enjoined the rule nationwide in what is called a vacatur opinion—essentially, taking the Biden rule completely off the books. In this extraordinary opinion, Kentucky Judge Danny C. Reeves found that the Biden Education Department had violated Title IX itself – the very legislation authorizing federal civil rights officials to make rules for Title IX –  by promoting gender ideology, stating the Biden rule “turns Title IX on its head.” The Department was denying women equal opportunity in school athletics and their privacy rights. In addition, the Kentucky court found the Biden rule flouted other federal statutes, such as the Administrative Procedures Act. This meant the rule also represented illicit agency overreach.

The Reeves opinion then directed schools to continue to comply with the Title IX regulation already in place since 2020 and promulgated under the first Trump administration. (Trump’s Education Department reinforced the Kentucky court order with its own Dear Colleague Letter to schools in February.) That Trump rule, in direct contrast to Biden’s attempted regulation, protects both women’s spaces and also free speech—it does not allow gender ideologues to demand that others use their preferred pronouns, for example—as well as due process for those accused of possible Title IX offenses.

But Trump 2.0 has strengthened Title IX policy even more with multiple executive orders. In February was Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports, which not only cited the federal case law against Biden’s rule but then ordered federal and state officials, such as state attorneys general and the secretary of state’s representative to the United Nations, to issue guidance on protecting women athletes and women’s spaces in both national and international competition.

In January, EO 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, was signed. More fundamentally, it recognizes the reality of male and female and places federal policy squarely on the side of reality and truth, not on the side of zany ideology and deceit, a not-so-veiled reference to Biden politicos and gender activists.

Predictably, both government and academic officials have resisted this restoration of common sense. Specifically, the Maine Education Department implied it would continue to have men on women’s teams, whereupon $30 million of federal funding was promptly paused while federal officials investigated it. Likewise, $175 million of federal funds has just been paused at the University of Pennsylvania for its similar policies allowing men in women’s sports. The University of Pennsylvania is most infamous on this point since it was home to the transvestite swimmer, Will Thomas, aka Lia Thomas, who ended up robbing female swimmer Riley Gaines of her title at the 2022 NCAA swimming championships, Women’s Division. She has since become a nationally recognized spokeswoman for preserving women’s sports—for women.

Of course, most recently, President Trump also signed a March 20 executive order to close the Department of Education. This affects Title IX since oversight of Title IX complaints is within the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights or “OCR.” Trump’s March 20 EO is titled Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities. The operative language is in Section 2, reading, “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the states and local communities …”

The president wants states and local communities to take the lead in education, as they did for most of America’s history before the federal Department of Education was created in 1980.

But what about Title IX? Enforcement of this nondiscrimination law and civil rights in education is handled by the Education Department’s OCR, now presumably on the chopping block along with most of the rest of the department. Many think that other offices of civil rights could take this over—the Justice Department, for example, has its own Office for Civil Rights and could add sex discrimination in education (that is, Title IX) to its responsibilities, just as the Department of Health and Human Services has an OCR and could take on matters concerning students with disabilities.

Whether such transitions bode well or ill for sound Title IX policy isn’t yet clear. But what is clear is Trump’s determination to discard the ideological extremism that the Biden Administration was advancing with Title IX and, specifically, with rules issued in its name. So while some questions remain, some certainty also exists about Title IX’s immediate future: No more radicalism masquerading as civil rights. And that’s more good news from Trump 2.0.

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Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She authored the 2020 report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.