CV NEWS FEED // The Department of Education’s (DoE) Office for Civil Rights issued a “dear colleague” letter Friday directing all public education institutions to revert to the original interpretation of Title IX after a long push by the Biden administration to reinterpret the women’s rights regulation to favor “transgender” rights.
“This letter is to clarify that, effective immediately, the United States Department of Education’s (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will enforce Title IX under the provisions of the 2020 Title IX Rule, rather than the recently invalidated 2024 Title IX Rule,” the letter stated.
“Accordingly,” the letter continues, “lawful Title IX enforcement” will be based on “the interpretation of ‘sex’ to mean the objective, immutable characteristic of being born male or female as outlined in the 2020 Title IX Rule.”
The letter was signed by the Trump DoE’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor.
“The department will return to enforcing Title IX protections on the basis of biological sex in schools and on campuses,” stated a Friday DoE press release announcing the “dear colleague” letter. “Returning to the 2020 Title IX Rule also ends a serious threat to campus free speech and ensures much stronger due process protections for students during Title IX proceedings.”
The release also included a statement from Trainor. “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,” he said. “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.”
The move comes weeks after a Jan. 9th federal ruling rejected the Biden administration’s attempt to add language about “gender identity” to Title IX’s anti-discrimination rules originally designed to protect female students and athletes.
As CatholicVote reported at the time, a the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Kentucky “threw out the outgoing Biden administration’s pro-LGBTQ rewrite of Title IX, which critics say undermined women’s and girls’ sports. The ruling applies to the entire country.”
The federal court’s “decision in the case Tennessee v. Cardona states that the administration’s ‘Final Rule and its corresponding regulations exceed the Department’s authority under Title IX,’” CatholicVote’s January report noted. “In addition, the court ruled that the rewrite violates the U.S. Constitution and is ‘the result of arbitrary and capricious agency action.’”
Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, celebrated last week’s “dear colleague” letter from the Trump DoE, stating in a Friday social media post: “At long last, the National nightmare of Biden’s Title IX rewrite – & a loss of equality for female students everywhere – comes to an end.”
“Today, Trump’s Dept of Education has released a ‘dear colleague’ letter to every school in the country, stating that the social experiment of ‘trans inclusive’ facilities, sports, bathrooms, & scholarships is done,” Parshall Perry continued. “‘Sex’ under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is back to being interpreted as male & female, as it always was.”
“Any school, recipient, college that doesn’t comply with the directive could lose federal funding,” she added. “Sanity has returned.”