Joe Biden’s bureaucrats spent four years rewriting the rules for America’s schools. Parents never got a vote.
But one leftover piece of that agenda sat tucked inside the federal rulebook long after voters sent Biden packing.
And now Donald Trump’s Education Department made one move that woke school administrators never wanted to see.
Linda McMahon wipes Biden’s Title IX rewrite off the books
The Department of Education issued a final rule on that formally removes the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations and restores the rules from President Donald Trump’s first term.
Under the rule, the department’s anti-discrimination policy recognizes sex as male or female at birth. Biden’s regulations had extended Title IX protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to students and employees at federally funded schools.
The 2024 Biden rules also forced schools to use the pronouns transgender students demanded. And they changed how schools handle harassment complaints.
The US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky struck those rules down on January 9, 2025 in Tennessee v. Cardona.
The Education Department then told schools it would enforce the 2020 rules from Trump’s first term. Schools have operated under those rules ever since. But the Biden language still sat in the Code of Federal Regulations, waiting.
The department said dismissals closed out the last lawsuits over the Biden rules in August 2026. And the final rule published in the Federal Register states that nobody can appeal the judgments against the 2024 rule anymore.
The warning McMahon sent to every school taking federal money
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the rulemaking “clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration.”
McMahon said the published regulations now match the court orders and what Congress intended. She said that cuts down on confusion for parents, students, and schools. Nobody running a school district has to guess anymore which rulebook counts.
And she had a warning for any administrator thinking about dragging his feet.
“We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls,” McMahon said. That is about as plain as a Cabinet Secretary gets.
McMahon told OutKick the move means “this is just returned to Title IX as it was originally intended.”
The rule follows a 2025 executive order from Trump directing federal agencies to recognize only male and female as sexes. The order tells agencies to apply that definition when they enforce laws against sex discrimination. The Education Department carried that order into the regulations that govern every school and college taking federal dollars.
Why the Left fought so hard over a few pages of regulation
Congress passed Title IX in 1972 to make sure women and girls got a fair shot in education. Fifty-plus years later, Biden’s appointees decided the word “sex” in that law meant whatever a federal bureaucrat said it meant.
Nobody in Congress voted for that.
Think about what the pronoun mandate asked of a teacher in a small-town government school. Washington ordered her to say something she knew to be false, in front of a classroom, or put her school’s federal funding at risk. And plenty of parents wondered who handed Washington that authority.
That’s where this story gets bigger than one regulation. Gender ideology never won at the ballot box, so its backers ran it through agencies, guidance letters, and rulemakings that most Americans never hear about until the damage lands in their kid’s school.
The harassment piece deserves a second look too. The 2020 rules gave accused students basic due process, including live hearings where both sides could question the evidence. Biden’s rewrite loosened those protections, and young men on campus stood to pay the price.
But regulations cut both ways.
What one administration writes, the next can erase. A future Democrat administration could reach for the same pen and restore every word of the 2024 rules. Maybe that sounds too gloomy for a good-news story, but the Left has shown plenty of patience on this issue.
The court ruling from January 2025 helps. And the executive order helps too, at least as long as Trump sits in the Oval Office.
Only Congress can lock the biological definition of sex into the statute itself.
Grandparents who raised daughters before Title IX remember when girls’ sports barely existed. They watched those teams, scholarships, and trophies come along one season at a time.
Women’s sports sit at the center of all of it. A school either keeps males out of girls’ competition or it watches girls’ competition disappear, because coaches chasing wins will recruit the bigger, faster athlete every time. McMahon’s department picked the girls, and schools now know which rulebook the federal government will hold them to.
But the fight over who defines “sex” in federal law will land back in Congress sooner or later.
Sources:
- Breitbart, “Trump Junks Biden’s Title IX Rules, Now Defines Sex by Biology”
- Fox News / OutKick, “Education Department rescinds Biden Title IX rule, restores Trump-era regulations”
- Federal Register, “Recodification of Title IX Rules”
- McGuireWoods, “Title IX Final Rule Vacated Nationwide”