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American educational institutions finally have clarity on whether they are required to open sex-segregated facilities, programs, and private spaces to trans-identified individuals or risk losing their federal funding. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter on January 31, 2025, putting the nation’s schools on notice that it is going back to the drawing board on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The law is a simple, 37-word statute prohibiting sex discrimination in all federally funded education programs, but it has been a source of some controversy over the past several years, particularly since 2021.

The Title IX regulatory ping pong game began when the Trump administration reversed Obama-era policies by issuing and finalizing a 2020 Title IX rule enhancing religious liberty and due process protections for students and recipients of educational funding. Under the Biden administration, a new rule was vetted and ultimately released in April 2024 through then-Secretary Miguel Cardona’s Education Department, rescinding the 2020 rule.

The 2020 rule, finalized after nearly 250,000 comments and considerable uproar, relied (erroneously, as many including myself have argued) on Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the United States Supreme Court decision holding that Title VII’s prohibition on sex-based employment discrimination also prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The confusion likely resulted from some of the language used by the opinion’s author, Justice Neil Gorsuch, such as his statement that “homosexuality and transgender status are inextricably bound up with sex.”

But Title VII and Title IX are distinct from one another—with differing language, purposes, and histories. Title VII is often seen as a “sex prohibitive” statute that prohibits any consideration of or reliance on sex in employment contexts. Title IX, on the other hand, sometimes requires consideration of the complainant’s sex to ensure educational equality for males and females.

President Trump’s Executive Order underlying the new Dear Colleague letter acknowledges the Biden administration’s argument that Bostock’s holding in the Title VII context should logically extend into the Title IX context to require “gender-identity-based access to single-sex spaces.” But it states in response: “This position is legally untenable and has harmed women.”

The new administration’s position is buoyed by a January 2025 federal court ruling out of the Eastern District of Kentucky in Tennessee v. Cardona, in which the court vacated the 2024 Title IX rule across the country. The court found that the Biden Department of Education had exceeded its statutory authority by defining “on the basis of sex” in a manner inconsistent with Title IX’s express language and purpose: to combat discrimination against women. It also determined that the 2024 rule was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act and constitutionally invalid under the Constitution’s Spending Clause and First Amendment for its vagueness and overbreadth.

Subsequent to its 2025 Dear Colleague letter, the Department of Education under the anticipated leadership of secretary-nominee Linda McMahon will rescind all contradictory guidance on “sex” that is inclusive of, among other things, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Biden-era guidance documents that fall into this category include the July 2024 guidance on “2024 Title IX Regulations: Pointers for Implementation”; the “U.S. Department of Education Toolkit: Creating Inclusive and Nondiscriminatory School Environments for LGBTQI+ Students”; and the June 2023 guidance on the “U.S. Department of Education Supporting LGBTQI+ Youth and Families in School.”

Though the federal district court in the Eastern District of Kentucky vacated the Biden-era Title IX rule, it did not address how courts should handle pending Title IX sex discrimination claims already opened. The 2025 EO and Dear Colleague letter, however, direct Title IX investigations that were initiated under the 2024 Title IX rule to be immediately reevaluated to ensure consistency with the requirements of the 2020 Title IX rule and its related preexisting regulations codified at 34 C.F.R. §§ 106, et seq. The letter states that “the definition of sexual harassment, the procedural protections owed to complainants and respondents, the provision of supportive measures to complainants, and school-level reporting processes as outlined in the 2020 Title IX Rule” will be enforced.

The Biden administration lost eleven times in federal court in challenges to its 2024 Title IX rule. It remains to be seen whether advocacy groups keen to expand anti-discrimination protections in American education will challenge the Trump administration’s Executive Order and its Title IX enforcement guidance. Until then, many Americans will welcome this return to the status quo.