The Department of Education announced Friday in a letter to K-12 schools and higher learning institutions that it will enforce the controversial 2020 Title IX regulations established during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. The guidelines faced widespread criticism for making it harder for students to report sexual violence and have such incidents investigated in a timely and trauma-informed manner. 

Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law designed to prevent schools that receive federal funding from engaging in sex discrimination against women and girls, sexual violence survivors and pregnant and parenting students. While President Joe Biden’s administration argued that the law also applies to LGBTQ+ students, Republicans largely oppose this approach to the statute, which each presidential administration is allowed to interpret differently. 

The Department of Education said that it is reverting back to the 2020 Title IX guidelines because on January 9 a federal judge in Kentucky, appointed by former President George W. Bush, ruled that the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rewrite was unenforceable for broadening the definition of sex discrimination to include bias based on “sex stereotypes, sex characteristics and sexual orientation.” The decision was a win for the attorney generals from Republican-led states who last year challenged the Biden administration’s inclusion of LGBTQ+ identity in its understanding of sex discrimination. 

“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,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. “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.” 

Trainor said in the letter sent to K-12 schools and higher education institutions that “to protect women,” the Department of Education will begin enforcing the 2020 Title IX regulations based on one’s sex assigned at birth immediately. Legal experts and advocates for sexual violence survivors questioned the agency’s motivations and whether the January 9 ruling allows it to make such a move. 

Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us, a nationwide student organizing program focused on college sexual assault prevention, said the 2020 guidelines do not protect women.

“Protecting the rights and safety of women and girls was never the goal of the first Trump administration’s regulatory efforts on Title IX under former Secretary [Betsy] DeVos, and it is certainly not the goal today,” she said. “The goal is to reinforce this extremely harmful narrative around trans youth and young adults as being a threat, when trans youth and young adults are not a threat to the safety of girls and women in school.”

In fact, Vitchers said, trans and gender-nonconforming students are disproportionately vulnerable to experiencing sexual violence in schools.

She also disputed that the Trump administration can revert back to the 2020 Title IX guidelines because of the January 9 ruling that vacated the Biden administration rule nationwide. 

“When the Biden regulation was put forward in April and then went into enforcement in August, multiple nonprofit groups and individuals filed various lawsuits in different court districts all across the country to challenge the rule,” she said. “So the January 9 ruling was just one of many rulings that we anticipated to come out.”

Vitchers said the judges presiding over the other cases could agree or disagree with the Kentucky judge’s ruling or uphold parts of the Biden administration rewrite, such as those strengthening protections for sexual violence survivors or pregnant and parenting students. 

“The Biden administration really called out the fact that students should not be discriminated against because of their pregnancy status, and ultimately, when the judge on January 9 vacated the entire rule, it meant that he not only vacated the pieces related to LGBTQ inclusion, but also for sexual harassment and pregnant and parenting students,” Vitchers said. “Given the climate that we are in around reproductive health care and access in this country, that is extremely harmful to students, particularly those that are in states that have extremely restrictive reproductive health care laws.”

Shiwali Patel, senior director of Safe and Inclusive Schools for the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of women, girls and LGBTQ+ people, said that she expects the January 9 decision to be challenged. 

“This is one district court decision, but there are federal circuit courts that have more precedential authority that have been very clear about Title IX’s broad scope and how Title IX protects trans and nonbinary students, and that that means allowing access to restrooms or playing sports like in the Fourth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit where they’ve struck down categorical sports bans,” Patel said. 

Patel also objected to the letter the Department of Education issued to schools on Friday because it indicates that an executive order Trump issued on January 20 called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” also invalidates the Biden administration’s Title IX revisions. The executive order instructs agencies and departments in the federal government’s executive branch to enforce policy with the understanding that just “two sexes, male and female,” exist.  

“These protections don’t just go away, even if the president wants it to be that way because he thinks he’s king, because he issued this executive order,” Patel said. “It doesn’t mean he can undo all this precedent. That’s not the power that he has.”

The National Women’s Law Center challenged the 2020 Title IX rule upon its finalization because it not only rolled back protections for survivors, Patel said, but instilled procedures that were hostile to them as well. Despite its shortcomings, she continued, the DeVos-era rule does not inhibit a definition of sex discrimination that includes gender identity. Other than a brief discussion of sex stereotyping, the older regulation simply does not discuss gender identity, she said.  

“The crux of the thesis of the 2020 regulations was that young men on campus needed to be protected from women filing false allegations of sexual assault under Title IX and ruining their lives,” Vitchers said. “And that is why it is so confusing and so disingenuous for this second Trump administration to come out and make any claim about caring about the safety of women and girls.”

Under the 2020 regulations, Vitchers said, schools were only legally required to investigate sexual misconduct cases in which students experienced severe and pervasive sexual violence. The unprecedented requirement for survivors to endure live cross examinations also dissuaded them from reporting wrongdoing, according to advocates.

“That pushed so many young people out of pursuing a complete Title IX investigation because the thought of having to sit across from their assailant, either in person or virtually, was, frankly, too much for them to bear,” Vitchers said.

If the Trump administration really wants to protect survivors, it would invest resources in sexual violence prevention training for students, she said.

Investments should also go toward educating survivors about the Title IX process and to restorative justice programs to address sexual misconduct, according to Reid Pinckard, a senior at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and an activist with Know Your IX — a youth-led project from Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that organizes around sexual health, rights and justice. Pinckard became a sexual violence survivor during his first year at university, he said. They called the 2020 Title IX regulations “perpetrator-centric,” recalling that survivors they knew were scared to come forward because of concerns about how the process would unfold.

Having attended the University of Arkansas and grown up in East Texas, Pinckard said that he never had access to the 2024 Title IX regulations due to the lawsuits that stopped them from being enforced regionally and, most recently, nationally. 

“At no point did we ever get to see a future in which we gained access to a Title IX rule that was a lot more LGBT+ inclusive but also more survivor centric,” they said of the South. “So we’re still operating kind of as we were, unfortunately. Also, with this new administration, it didn’t come as a shock that this is what was going to happen.”

The notion that transphobia inspired most of the lawsuits against the 2024 Title IX rewrite upsets Pinckard, who is queer. 

“I think it’s frustrating to sit here and hear those things skewed about me and my community and the people around me,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I think, ‘Our existence is resistance,’ and acknowledging that is something that is so powerful, especially if you’re able to sit in community with other queer people and people that have diverse experiences.”