Schools adjust to Title IX changes

John Mark Yeats, president of Corban University, a private Christian college in Salem, Oregon, remembers deciphering more than 1,200 pages of federal regulations in 2020 when the Trump administration revised Title IX rules. He said the school then rewrote its policies to align with the Biden administration’s 2024 changes to Title IX, but before it could implement them, a court ruling last year exempted the school from following the guidance.

“Title IX has become the football that gets kicked back and forth in change of administration,” Yeats said. Title IX is a federal law that protects women and girls from discrimination in education. “These are things that we are required to follow, we are required to do,” Yeats said. “And yet it changes every three to four years, and it’s very, very confusing for faculty, [administrators], athletic directors.”

On Thursday, a district court in Kentucky struck down the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX. Schools across the country will be checking their policies for compliance with the previous regulations, finalized under then-President Donald Trump in 2020, which are again in effect.

Title IX of the Civil Rights Act prevents schools that receive public funding from discriminating on the basis of sex, and it sets guidelines for how schools should respond to allegations of sexual misconduct. Last year, the Biden administration finalized Title IX rules that largely undid Trump-era changes to the policy surrounding sexual misconduct investigations. It also broadened the definition of sex to include gender identity, sparking a host of questions about how school policies should address restroom use, athletic programs, and even teachers’ speech.

“The big issue for Christian schools who have a traditional understanding of marriage is, if that is redone, then that opens up Pandora’s box to gender and sex being something that is self-interpreted, and it becomes a whole different category,” said Yeats.

After the Biden administration released its guidance in April 2024, 26 states filed 10 lawsuits and received temporary injunctions that blocked enforcement of the rule in their states. Christian schools could apply for exemptions to portions of the rules that conflicted with their religious beliefs, but other provisions of the rules still applied, requiring them to re-do some of their policies.

The rule affected many students and teachers. A 15-year-old female track athlete in West Virginia had to compete alongside a male teammate and share private spaces like locker rooms and restrooms with him. During the male student’s three years on the team, he finished ahead of almost 300 female runners. The female athlete joined a lawsuit filed by six states to challenge the Title IX changes.

Christian Educators, a religious association of teachers with some 15,000 members nationwide, was a plaintiff in the Kentucky lawsuit. Executive director David Schmus said the changes to Title IX required teachers to refer to students by pronouns the students chose, regardless of the teacher’s personal convictions. “That is a violation of their free speech and their religious rights,” explained Schmus. “They would have to oversee locker rooms and bathrooms that would be able to be used by students inconsistent with their biological sex. They would have to potentially oversee overnight field trips in which accommodations would be reserved and assigned not according to biological sex.”

The Biden administration based its changes to Title IX on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 case in which the court reinterpreted civil rights law to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity. But the Kentucky court held that the Department of Education “reads Bostock far too broadly by importing its holding into the context of Title IX.”

The court’s opinion left little room for further debate. “When Title IX is viewed in its entirety, it is abundantly clear that discrimination on the basis of sex means discrimination on the basis of being a male or female,” Chief U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves wrote in his summary judgment. Reeves said that Title IX relies on the understanding that men and women are biologically unique. “Expanding the meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ turns Title IX on its head,” he wrote.

Matt Sharp is a lead attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the plaintiffs before the Kentucky court. He says the court’s decision is good news for Christian educators and students. “They don’t have to worry about the federal government knocking on their door and telling them that they have to embrace radical gender ideology or to contradict clear Scriptural teachings on what it means to be male and female and other core teachings,” said Sharp.

The Kentucky court’s opinion won’t necessarily determine how similar lawsuits play out, but Sharp hopes it will influence future rulings.

Even though Title IX has returned to its 2020 language, some states will continue to mandate that schools consider gender identity as a protected status, meaning rules can vary wildly based on geography.

As of Jan. 1 in California, districts can no longer require staff to inform parents if a child wants to be called by a different name or pronoun. Twenty states and Washington, D.C., have enacted laws that specifically list gender identity and sexual orientation in protections from discrimination.

Yeats of Corban University said the school competes at different college campuses across the Northwest, potentially making it difficult to continue protecting female athletes. “If this gets kicked to the states, it’s going to create an interesting environment where it’s going to require a lot of wisdom,” he said. “What this means … we’re gonna have to wait and see. And so none of us really know.”