The Biden administration's 2024 Title IX rule expanded protections for students who report sexual harassment and assault and wrote into federal regulation that sex discrimination “includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.” Republican-led states sued, and it never took full effect: eight courts blocked it in 2024, and a federal court in Kentucky vacated it in full on January 9, 2025, with a Texas court following on February 19. On January 31, 2025, eleven days into Trump's second term, the Education Department announced it would enforce the rules that existed before, the ones his first administration wrote in 2020.
The administration then chose not to defend the Biden rule on appeal. In May 2026 it agreed to dismiss the pending appeals in the Sixth and Fifth Circuits, making the vacaturs final, according to the department's own account in the Federal Register. On September 25, 2026, Education Secretary Linda McMahon signed a final rule, published September 29, that formally repeals the 2024 rule and restores the 2020 text. The department issued it without taking public comment, citing an exemption for rules relating to grants and benefits, and states in it: “It effects no change of current substantive law.”
What the restored 2020 rules require is narrower than the 2024 version, not nothing. Schools must respond to sexual harassment when they have “actual knowledge” of it, and must respond “in a manner that is not deliberately indifferent,” which the rule defines as “clearly unreasonable in light of the known circumstances.” Harassment short of quid pro quo or the specific crimes it lists must be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access” to education. Colleges must hold a live hearing at which each party's adviser can question the other party and witnesses, “including those challenging credibility.” The repeal also removes the 2024 rule's gender-identity and sexual-orientation language.
McMahon framed it around athletics in an interview with OutKick: “We're just acknowledging that boys and men are in boys and men's sports and girls are in theirs.” Asked what it accomplishes given the department was already enforcing the older rules: “Well, it just gives clarification to students, teachers, schools, parents.” For the department's enforcement record since, see The Education Department's Civil Rights Office Dismisses Over 90% of Discrimination Complaints and Redirects to Targeting Trans Students and The Education Department Said Up to 61 Male Students Held Girls' Roster Spots in a Colorado District. The District Says They Were Mascots and Managers..
Update (September 29, 2026): the rule took effect September 29, without a public comment period. Secretary Linda McMahon's announcement: “Today's 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.” Kelley Robinson of the Human Rights Campaign said dropping the rule into place without comment “shows how little they care about the safety of our students.” As the Advocate noted, the immediate practical change may be limited, since the department had been enforcing the 2020 rules all along.
Correction (September 28, 2026): this entry has been rewritten. Earlier versions said the administration “rolled back” the 2024 rule and “eliminated” requirements that schools investigate assaults. A federal court vacated the 2024 rule before the administration acted on it, and the 2020 rules it restored still require schools with actual knowledge of harassment to respond. Earlier versions also included a 90 percent complaint-dismissal figure, a “chilling effect” claim and a one-in-five statistic that we could not trace to a cited source; they have been removed. Severity was lowered from severe to moderate, and an unverifiable citation was dropped.