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A federal judge in Kentucky has vacated the Biden administration’s Title IX rules nationwide, meaning they are no longer in effect anywhere in the country.
The decision released Thursday represents a blow to LGBTQ students and their allies. They believed the new Title IX rules could serve as a bulwark against state laws allowing teachers to not use students’ chosen names and pronouns and barring transgender students from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
The ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Danny Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky comes on the cusp of a second Trump administration, which observers expected would rescind the rules through a longer, more bureaucratic process. President-elect Donald Trump made opposition to transgender rights a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
Reeves’ decision means that Title IX rules finalized in 2020 under the first Trump administration are once again the law of the land. Those rules, developed under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, were controversial in their own right because they changed the sexual assault complaint process in ways that favored the accused. Those rules assumed that Title IX treated sex as binary and declined to further define it. In response to public comments at the time, the department said people of any gender identity should be protected from harassment on the basis of sex but did not single out transgender individuals for protections.
DeVos also withdrew Obama-era guidance and stopped investigating complaints about bathroom access.
In his ruling, Reeves found that the Biden administration overstepped its authority by interpreting laws against sex discrimination to include gender identity. Reeves, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, also found that the rule “offends the First Amendment” because teachers who refuse to use students’ names and pronouns could have faced discipline.
Congress passed Title IX in 1972 to ban discrimination in education “on the basis of sex.” Courts have repeatedly found that Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, decisions that have formed the legal backbone for protections based on gender identity. But Title IX also allows for sex-segregated programs and facilities. Reeves said that makes including gender identity contradictory.
“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex — throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless,” Reeves wrote in his opinion.
Title IX ruling could create confusion for schools
The Biden administration’s update to the rules made it explicit that Title IX should cover discrimination against gender identity, following similar guidance in effect during the Obama administration, as well as various court rulings. Denying students access to bathrooms that align with their gender identity or persistently misgendering students likely would have represented a violation of their rights under the Biden rules.
When the Biden Education Department announced the rules in April following extensive public comment, LGBTQ advocates cheered. But Republican attorneys general and conservative parent groups almost immediately filed lawsuits objecting. When the rules went into effect in August, court rulings had already blocked implementation in more than half the states.
Thursday’s ruling comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the states of Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia.
“This is a huge win for Tennessee, for common sense, and for women and girls across America,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement. “The court’s ruling is yet another repudiation of the Biden administration’s relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology through unconstitutional and illegal rulemaking. Because the Biden rule is vacated altogether, President Trump will be free to take a fresh look at our Title IX regulations when he returns to office next week.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
The Biden Title IX rules did not address sports participation. In draft rules, the administration proposed that younger students should be able to participate freely on sports teams that align with their gender identity, but that schools could adopt restrictions based on fairness and safety for older students and at more competitive levels. With intense controversy over the rules and Republicans who oppose transgender women’s participation in women’s sports poised to control the federal government, the Biden administration withdrew the proposed rules in late December.
Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, said it’s not impossible the federal government could appeal the decision and seek some sort of emergency intervention. But it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration continuing the case.
“This court decision is so damaging and really disregards that students are still experiencing discrimination at high levels,” she said.
Patel said it’s important for students and officials alike to understand that students still have rights to a safe school environment, and the ruling doesn’t prevent states or school districts from adopting policies that go beyond the floor set in federal law.
The new ruling also throws out noncontroversial aspects of the new Title IX rules that were not challenged in court, including protections for pregnant and parenting students and procedural changes that gave districts more flexibility in how they responded to complaints.
But Reeves wrote that the challenged provisions dealing with transgender rights and gender identity “fatally taint” the entire set of rules, and that it was not the court’s job to rewrite them to bring them into compliance with the law.
States where the Biden Title IX rules were blocked continued to use the 2020 rules and won’t really see any change from the ruling, said Kayleigh Baker, an attorney and senior consultant with TNG Consulting and an advisory board member of the Association of Title IX Administrators.
But school districts in states not under an injunction — generally those with Democratic leadership — have invested time and money in revamping their procedures and training staff.
“Now it feels that that work was for naught,” she said. “And we’re frustrated on behalf of those people who thought they had rights who no longer have rights.”
These school districts may also have cases under investigation or that have already been decided using the 2024 procedures and frameworks, Baker said. The ruling doesn’t address how those cases should be handled, and school district officials should consult with their attorneys, she said.
The Trump administration could also propose more changes to Title IX or Congress could take action.
“We may not yet be done with changes in the regulatory landscape,” she said.
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
