Education Secretary Linda McMahon scrapped Biden’s Title IX rewrite and restored Trump-era campus sex rules, saying the change ends confusion over gender identity.
On Monday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon unveiled a final regulation that repeals the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX and puts the first Trump administration’s campus sexual-misconduct rule back on the books. The Education Department said the final rule is expected to publish officially on Tuesday.
Politico reported that the action clears the prior administration’s version of the federal education law barring sex discrimination and restores the earlier standard for how colleges investigate sexual misconduct.
McMahon cast the move as a return to law, court orders, and plain language parents and schools can follow.
In a statement, McMahon said the regulation “clears the Biden Administration's illegal rewrite of Title IX” and “restores the commonsense language.”
She added:
"Thanks to today's action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflect court orders and Congressional intent, reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions,"
An agency fact sheet struck the same note. It said the rule was needed “to help eliminate public confusion about the Biden Administration's unlawful attempt to stretch Title IX's legal protections to cover 'sexual orientation' and 'gender identity.'” The fact sheet also said the regulation does not reflect any new policy decisions.
The Education Department amplified that line on social media, saying it was “formally putting into regulation what the law has said all along: Title IX's protections are based on SEX, not 'gender identity.'”
Federal courts vacated the Biden-era Title IX regulation that sought stronger discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The preamble to the new final rule repeatedly highlights those court decisions striking down the prior rule over those protections.
That history matters. The Biden rule did not merely tweak process. It tried to stretch a sex-discrimination statute into a vehicle for gender-identity policy on campus. Courts rejected that approach. McMahon’s department is now cleaning the regulatory books to match what judges already held.
For nearly two years, the Education Department has enforced the first Trump administration’s Title IX regulation through guidance and has said it is enforcing civil rights law on the basis of biological sex. Monday’s final regulation turns that posture into formal rule text again.
The first Trump administration rule, issued when Betsy DeVos was education secretary, required schools to handle sexual misconduct reports through a formal process. That process included courtroom-like hearings. Representatives for alleged offenders and survivors could call witnesses, challenge credibility, and assess evidence.
The DeVos rule also changed the government’s definition of sexual harassment and allowed schools to use a higher standard of proof than the Obama-era guidance had pushed. Those changes were aimed at basic fairness: notice, evidence, and a real chance to test accusations before a student’s education and reputation are wrecked.
DeVos’s Title IX rulemaking drew more than 100,000 comments. Former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s later regulation drew nearly three times as many. Heavy comment volume did not save the Biden rule in court.
The final regulation McMahon unveiled stops short of defining “sex” in Title IX as biological sex. The department’s fact sheet framed the action as cleanup, not a fresh policy turn.
Other final regulations listed on the government’s unified agenda point further. Several seek additional changes to the anti-sex-discrimination law, including a formal definition of sex as based on biological sex in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order. In other words, this Title IX restoration is one step in a wider effort to lock the statute back to sex, not identity ideology.
Education advocates, unnamed in the reporting, said they did not get clarity during White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs review on what the regulation was trying to accomplish. The department moved ahead anyway and is now publishing the final text.
Reporting flagged possible legal pushback because the department did not run the action through the typical notice-and-comment process used for major rules. Whether challengers file, and whether courts treat the repeal-and-restore package as proper cleanup after a vacated rule, remains open.
What is not open is the core sequence. Biden officials rewrote Title IX to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. Courts vacated that rewrite. The second Trump administration enforced the earlier DeVos-era framework by guidance for nearly two years. McMahon has now put that framework back into the Code of Federal Regulations and stripped the Biden text out.
College campuses live under these rules every day. How a school defines harassment, how it runs a hearing, and whether Title IX means sex or “gender identity” decides real cases involving real students. Parents, accused students, and survivors all need clear rules tied to statute and court orders, not a regulatory experiment that judges already threw out.
Title IX was written to stop sex discrimination in education. Restoring that meaning, and the due-process guardrails that go with it, is overdue common sense, not radicalism.
