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The U.S. Department of Education cast changes to Title IX rules announced Monday as a “commonsense” step to protect women and girls by reinstating regulations from the first Trump administration.
But while Monday’s move arguably is a formality, it cements an approach to investigating campus sexual assault and harassment that many advocates believe harms survivors. It also sets the stage for removing protections for LGBTQ students under federal civil rights law.
The department’s move to formally rescind Title IX regulations adopted in 2024 under President Joe Biden wasn’t surprising, advocates and experts said. But the effort to clarify where Title IX regulations stand may also foreshadow the agency’s more-ambitious regulatory priorities, which include defining sex.
The Biden-era regulations rescinded Monday had already been tossed out by a federal judge in 2025. They stated that gender identity is covered by Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal support. That was cheered by LGBTQ students and their supporters.
Monday’s announcement instead formally codifies Title IX rules developed during President Donald Trump’s first term under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and released in 2020. Those rules do not define sex, but treat it as a binary.
The 2020 rules were widely rebuked by advocates for survivors of sexual assault. They argued the rules would make it harder for victims to prove their case, giving more rights to the accused than previous rules.
The Education Department’s Monday announcement shied away from noting the rules’ effects on harassment investigations. But critics of the Trump administration’s latest move noted the announcement came on the heels of a lawsuit laying out devastating accusations of rape at Cornell University. The university investigated the case through a Title IX process, but the lawsuit alleges most of the accused students received weak sanctions.
The most significant result of Monday’s announcement might be that the rules that schools have been “expected to follow since basically the early days of this administration are now what is finally going to be reflected in all the places where you would expect them to be,” said Kayleigh Baker, a consultant with TNG Consulting and a member of the Association of Title IX Administrators’ advisory board.
Education Department could narrow Title IX’s definition of sex
Title IX has suffered from a case of regulatory whiplash.
The 2024 Biden rules for Title IX were almost immediately challenged by Republican-led states before they were struck down the following year. The second Trump administration started operating under the 2020 rules. But the Title IX rules published in the Federal Register and elsewhere didn’t really reflect that reality, said Baker.
Those 2020 regulations focused on the process of investigating Title IX complaints, particularly allegations of harassment and assault. The rules require that both K-12 and higher education institutions notify anyone accused of a policy violation of the allegations lodged against them, said Baker.
The rules also set out minimum wait times for hearings on violations of harassment and assault. That can significantly lengthen the time it takes to reach a resolution in a sexual misconduct case, particularly for K-12 schools, Baker said.
Overall, these rules have been followed by schools for quite some time, she said.
Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, helped work on the 2020 Title IX rules while at the Education Department. The process the department developed protects “both men and women,” she said. The department heard from students accused of sexual misconduct — often men — who were not given enough opportunities to dispute the allegations against them.
“What it really does is make sure that these allegations are taken with the seriousness and gravity that they demand,” she said.
But Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice for the National Women’s Law Center, said her organization has heard from survivors over the years who have said the department’s prescribed Title IX investigation process felt traumatic and unfair. The Cornell story only raises more questions, Patel said.
Reverting to 2020 Title IX rules “creates less safe campuses. It removes obligations for educational institutions to respond to sexual harassment,” Patel said. “It has led to fewer survivors wanting to report because they view the Trump administration’s 2020 rule as not one that is intended to protect them.”
Parshall Perry said shifting to the 2020 Title IX rules also sets the stage for the Education Department to change the definition of sex in Title IX. The department has said Title IX’s definition of sex should “refer exclusively to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
But if the administration takes a crack at defining sex in the civil rights law through rulemaking, right now there’s nothing stopping the next administration from rolling it back.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this summer that states can ban transgender students from participating in women’s and girls’ sports. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion that, at least in the context of sports, the plain meaning of “sex” in Title IX “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.” But some conservatives expressed disappointment that the court did not go further in defining sex.
The only way to stop the whiplash is for Congress to define sex under Title IX, Parshall Perry said. But that politically sensitive proposition hasn’t found much traction on Capitol Hill.
“This is regulatory ping-pong,” she said. “We’ve been back and forth between Democratic and Republican administrations now for the better part of 16 years.”
In the meantime, moving ahead with the rule would send a “cruel message” to transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students, Kei Williams, executive director of the NEW Pride Agenda, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ students, wrote in an emailed response to questions.
“Students are already afraid to report harassment or ask for help; this would exacerbate those fears,” Williams wrote.
Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org. Lily is on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook.
