Trump's Title IX Announcement Is Cruel. But It Does Not Change The Law

The Trump administration this week moved to formally rescind Biden-era Title IX regulations that spelled out protections for LGBTQ students. Writing in Time, Chase Strangio argues the step is cruel but legally hollow: it leaves existing protections untouched, and schools remain free, and in his view obligated, to keep transgender students fully involved in every school program.

The reason, he explains, is that the Biden rules never took effect. Courts halted them, so enforcement had already returned to a version written during Betsy DeVos's tenure as education secretary. Reinstating that earlier version therefore alters no current standard. Strangio adds that a president cannot rewrite the statute itself, and that the Supreme Court has held that discriminating against someone for being gay or transgender amounts to sex discrimination. Those protections stand unless the justices rule otherwise.

He acknowledges that earlier this year the Supreme Court allowed states and schools to bar transgender women and girls from women's and girls' sports. Yet neither that ruling nor the revived 2020 rules requires schools to do so, he says, and outside athletics both federal and local protections remain enforceable. Strangio cites a survey of 2,800 LGBTQ students, in which 68% described harassment or assault linked to being transgender and 62% to their sexual orientation; a follow-up group after the 2024 election found rising hostility. He concludes that state and local officials must now safeguard these students.

Summarized by PolitiKool from Time’s reporting. Read the full story at Time →