A federal judge on Thursday struck down the U.S. Department of Education’s interpretation of Title IX that would have made gender identity, as well as biological sex, a protected class under the statute.
While the rule—and the judge’s decision—don’t directly apply to equity in athletics, it does have indirect implications for what counts as gender discrimination on sports teams. The ruling also bolsters the ability of the incoming Trump Administration to enact restrictions on transgender athlete participation.
“The Final Rule and its corresponding regulations exceed the Department’s authority under Title IX, violate the Constitution, and are the result of arbitrary and capricious agency action,” the U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Danny Reeves, wrote in a 15-page opinion.
The lawsuit was brought against President Biden’s DOE in April by the attorneys general for Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. At the center of the case: Title IX, the 50-year-old statute that prohibits any educational institution that receives federal funding from discriminating “on the basis of sex”—and is the statute used to require equal sports participation opportunities and resources for women’s sports at all school levels.
The Department of Education released Title IX interpretations in April that would extend the statute’s sex discrimination prohibition to protecting against discrimination based on all gender identities. Among other things, it theoretically would have provided protections to transgender students by allowing them to file complaints if they felt they faced prejudice at school, or perhaps even on sports teams. (While the DOE doesn’t have the ability to rewrite laws, it can publish interpretations of them that vary from administration to administration.)
The rule, which went into effect in August, was challenged by several state AGs in federal court in two separate cases. Judges blocked the DOE from enforcing the rule in 10 states, but it wasn’t until Thursday that a judge had struck down the rule from a national perspective.
“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,” Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement. “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.”
President-elect Trump has vowed that his DOE, which he appointed WWE cofounder Linda McMahon to lead, would reverse these interpretations (though now, he won’t have to). He’s also pledged to ban transgender athletes from playing women’s sports through executive action.
The DOE had previously considered a sports-specific Title IX interpretation that would have awarded significant protection to transgender athletes who wanted to play sports on teams that aligned with their gender identity, rather than their assigned biological sex at birth. But the DOE rule withdrew the proposal in December, citing both pending court cases on the issue and the number of public comments they received.
Meanwhile, the Republican-led House has made it a priority to vote on a bill that would ban transgender athletes from women’s sports by rewriting Title IX altogether. The “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act” would add language to the statute defining sex discrimination as only related to a person’s biological sex at birth. The law would prevent protections for transgender people via Title IX and help pave the way for a ban on transgender athletes playing women’s sports in virtually all educational settings.
