The Bonfire of the Title IX Agreements

By Paul Zimmerman

Sunday, April 19, 2026

 

During the Obama and Biden administrations, federal officials investigated several school districts for violating Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in education. What was their offense? They refused to accept that Title IX includes “gender identity,” an idea that lawmakers never considered when they passed the law in 1972.

 

This stance was unacceptable to the radical political appointees in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Education Department, so they opened investigations that ultimately produced so-called “voluntary” resolution agreements between the department and the school districts.

 

For example, in 2015, the Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania agreed to sweeping policy changes after facing the threat of losing federal funding. Based on a radical interpretation of Title IX, the OCR coerced the district to ban discrimination based on “gender identity, gender expression, gender transition, transgender status, or gender nonconformity.” This led, in practice, to policies that opened the door to males competing in female sports and using girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

 

Earlier this month, the Trump administration rescinded these illegal “voluntary” resolution agreements. This historic step deserves more attention and praise.

 

By squelching those extortive requirements, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has confirmed that the department has no authority to impose gender ideology in schools across the country and that it will not enforce those provisions of existing resolution agreements that attempt to do so.

 

Current and former Education Department officials can cite no other instance in which a resolution agreement has been withdrawn. The unprecedented nature of the OCR’s revocation of these resolution agreements arises from the unprecedented rewriting of federal civil rights law by two previous administrations in furtherance of gender ideology.

 

Between 1972 and 2015, no administration had thought to interpret Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on “gender identity.” That understanding of what “sex” means changed in the lame-duck Obama years and during the unabashedly “intersectionalist” Biden administration, which issued regulations in 2024 that would have forced every public K–12 school across the country to eliminate sex-separated spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms in favor of access based on gender identity. The Education Department has now ended that indefensible interpretation of Title IX, which has been blocked by numerous federal courts and the Supreme Court. These rulings recognized that it is for Congress to define what kind of discrimination is prohibited under federal law.

 

But the importance of the OCR’s rescission of these resolution agreements lies not just in ending unlawful government overreach. It is vital to recognize that, although the Education Department has changed hands, many states, from California to Maine, continue to enforce gender ideology in state law.

 

In Minnesota, girls who counted on sex-separated sports must surrender their safety and dignity by competing against boys who identify as female. In Maryland, students once protected from unauthorized bathroom access who object to using their sex-separated locker room in the presence of a member of the opposite sex must now either stay silent or request to use a less-convenient, single-user space. California bars parents from knowing whether their children are sharing a bedroom on a school-sponsored trip with male or female students or adult staff members. Other states mimic these requirements.

 

This blue-state dysfunction places school districts in an awkward position of having to choose between complying with state law or Title IX. But just as Title IX does not allow federal authorities to force schools to accept gender ideology, it certainly doesn’t permit state or local agencies to require that their schools discriminate. Title IX applies to all federally funded educational agencies and institutions, whether located in a red state or a blue state. Under the Constitution, Title IX reigns supremely on these issues.

 

The Trump administration should follow up its welcome rescission of lawless resolution agreements with a regulatory proposal to rescind the Biden administration’s indefensible 2024 Title IX regulations and replace them with new rules that protect students, families, and teachers against the harms of gender ideology. Such regulations would clarify that sex is binary and biological and would prohibit schools and colleges from requiring students to cede their privacy, safety, or dignity in sports or private spaces as a condition of equal access to educational opportunities. Such rulemaking could also serve as a model for Congress to enact statutory reforms that would prevent future administrations from exploiting Title IX to advance gender ideology.