The U.S. Department of Education on Monday announced that it is rescinding parts of Title IX agreements on LGBTQ student protection that were reached during the Obama and Biden administrations that it calls burdensome and put girls and women at risk. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
The Trump administration on Monday moved to end civil rights settlements with two colleges and five local school districts requiring them to prevent discrimination against transgender students.
The Department of Education announced that it would rescind resolution agreements made by the Obama and Biden administrations over Title IX violations that included penalties for refusing to use preferred student pronouns or asking about a student’s preferred gender.
In addition to attempting to root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI, the administration has worked to roll back protections for transgender people.
“The Trump administration is removing the unnecessary and unlawful burdens that prior administrations imposed on schools in its relentless pursuit of a radical transgender agenda,” Kimberly Richey, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a press release.
“While previous administrations launched Title IX investigations based on ‘misgendering,’ the Trump administration is investigating allegations of girls and women being injured by men on their sports team or feeling violated by men in their intimate spaces,” Richey said.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was enacted to prohibit sex discrimination in an education program or activity that receives federal funding, according to the Department of Education.
During the first Trump administration, in 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions moved to withdraw Obama administration guidance that transgender students be permitted to use the restroom with which they identify.
In 2024, the Biden administration introduced a rule that required schools to respond quickly to sex and gender discrimination, as well as to expand overall LGBTQ rights on campuses and give sexual abuse victims more power in cases.
The Biden era rule was struck down in January 2025 after the attorneys general in Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky challenged the Title IX rules related to LGBTQ, and specifically transgender, people.
When President Donald Trump retook office later in January 2025, the administration immediately returned to the first Trump administration’s Title IX rule which “properly safeguards against discrimination on the basis of sex,” DOE said.
The department is rescinding parts of six agreements that were enacted through what it called “illegal, heavy-handed manipulation of Title IX” that were reached with the Cape Henlopen School District, Delaware Valley School District, Fife School District, La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified community college and Taft College.
The agreements were rescinded, the Education Department said, because “these districts are not in violation of the law and are freed from these terms of the resolution agreements.”
A former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights told The New York Times that rescinding previously agreed to settlements with schools and school districts has not happened often, if ever.
“To go back and terminate agreements and say all of the policies and procedures should be reversed as if nothing ever happened, that is very different and a very big deal,” said Nancy Potter, a former supervising lawyer in the civil rights office.
Several school districts contacted by The Times said they had not been informed about the rescinded rules, said they did not intend to change the policies they have agreed to or that individual school boards would still need to vote to actually rescind the rules they have in place.
This week in Washington
President Donald Trump makes a statement on Iran from the White House Press Briefing Room in Washington on Monday. Trump recounted the rescue of a service member from inside Iran and said that the country could be “taken out in one night.” Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/UPI | License Photo
