The United States Department of Education on Monday rescinded the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX guidelines, which included protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding. The ED announced that it will reinstate the first Trump Administration’s 2020 Title IX framework, which interprets the law based on biological sex and does not include protections for LGBTQ+ people, according to the department’s Monday press release.
Returning to the 2020 framework will realign Title IX protections with “biological reality,” the ED said in the press release. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked policies that promote the inclusion of transgender people in his second term, including by signing an executive order recognizing only two sexes and defining sex as determined “at conception” on his first day in office.
“Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the press release.
The ED is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Justice to create teams of attorneys and investigators to enforce the Trump administration’s Title IX framework, according to the press release.
The department noted in the press release that it has launched investigations into several other educational institutions, including the California Community College Athletic Association, for allegedly allowing “men to compete in women’s sports and/or occupy female-only intimate spaces.”
The Trump Administration froze $584 million in UCLA’s federal research grants in July 2025, alleging that the university allowed “men to participate in women’s sports,” as well as antisemitism and affirmative action. Chancellor Julio Frenk denied these allegations in a January interview with the Daily Bruin.
Following the federal funding freeze, the Trump administration sent a letter to the university asking it to overhaul policies supporting transgender students and issue a public statement saying that it does not recognize transgender people’s identities in exchange for restoring funding.
UCLA did not comply with the letter’s demands.
[Related: UCLA advocates react to Trump administration’s anti-transgender demands]
A federal judge restored most of the grants in August and September 2025 and ruled separately in November that the Trump administration could not freeze or threaten to freeze any more of the UC’s funding. The same judge ruled in November that the settlement demands were illegal.
[Related: One year after $584 million federal funding freeze, UCLA research still recovering]
A UCLA Athletics spokesperson previously told the Daily Bruin following the funding freeze that the university complies with the NCAA’s ban on transgender women participating in women’s sports. The league’s rule was implemented after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2025 that sought to ban them from competing.
The ED has already reached agreements with some universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and Wagner College, to reinstate sex-separated sports and facilities.
The department has also taken action against institutions that it found refused similar settlements, including by referring the California Department of Education’s alleged Title IX violations to the DOJ, the press release said.
UCLA Media Relations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how the change in regulations will impact the university.
“We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls,” McMahon said in the press release.
