US rolls back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students without public comment

The Education Department reinstated Trump-era rules, removing explicit federal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Told by Claire Lawson · 30 September 2026

The US Department of Education announced yesterday it's putting Trump-era Title IX rules back in force, which sounds administrative until you realise what it actually does: it removes the explicit federal protection that said discriminating against LGBTQ+ students counts as sex discrimination. The change took effect Tuesday, 29 September.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the move was meant to "align the published regulations with court decisions and reduce uncertainty for schools and families," PinkNews reported. Here's what she actually said: "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," according to LGBTQ Nation.

The Biden administration's 2024 rule followed the logic of the 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton Co., which found you can't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity without taking sex assigned at birth into account — so Title IX's ban on sex discrimination covered LGBTQ+ students too. A federal judge in Kentucky vacated that rule nationwide in January 2025 after it had already been temporarily blocked in 26 states, PinkNews reported.

What that means in practice: a trans student harassed for being trans no longer has an explicit federal rule saying that's sex discrimination under Title IX. A student kicked out of campus housing for being gay no longer has that rule either. The 2020 regulations now back in force — issued under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — include procedural requirements such as live hearings in some college sexual-misconduct cases, which advocates say make it harder for survivors to come forward.

Cathy Renna, communications director at the National LGBTQ Task Force, told The Advocate: "This has weakened protections for all students, especially trans students, women and girls, and those who experience sexual harassment or sexual assault." HRC said in a release that the rule change means "the voices of survivors of rape and sexual assault" will be "suppressed" and it will be "easier for their perpetrators to get away with their actions," LGBTQ Nation reported.

Kelley Robinson, HRC's president, called it "a monstrous injustice" and pointed out the administration skipped the usual public comment period. "The fact that they're dropping this rule into place abruptly, without a comment period, denying families, educators, loved ones and the students themselves a say in how they should be treated, shows how little they care about the safety of our students," she told LGBTQ Nation.

Shiwali Patel of the National Women's Law Center told Politico: "While the administration is unlawfully eroding protections for trans students under the guise of 'protecting women and girls,' they are systematically weakening the very laws that keep students safe and schools accountable."

Title IX was enacted in 1972, barring sex discrimination in education programmes that receive federal funding. For 52 years it's been the thing students point to when a school tries to treat them differently because of their sex. Now, for LGBTQ+ students, the federal government's position is that Title IX doesn't explicitly cover them — even though a Supreme Court decision three years ago said the same logic applies.

So here's where that leaves a seventeen-year-old trans kid in a red state walking into school this week: the explicit federal rule that said harassing them for being trans was sex discrimination is gone, the Secretary of Education calls the rule that protected them "illegal," and nobody asked their family what they thought about it before it happened.