Judge Rejects Bidens Title IX Rules, Scrapping Protections for Trans Students

A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q.and pregnant students, among others, through the law known as Title IX.

It arrived just days before those protections were likely to face more scrutiny under a Trump administration that is expected to be hostile to the new rules and could refuse to defend them in court.In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C.Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky, wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote.

“Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”In April, the administration announced a revised version of Title IX, the 1972 law that is part of the Civil Rights Act and prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding, that applied more explicitly to transgender students.While it stopped short of some major changes — such as requiring schools to accommodate transgender students in single-sex dorms or sports teams — it generally prohibited schools and their staff from rejecting a student’s gender identity in most everyday contexts.The changes ran into immediate opposition from Republican states, which filed legal challenges, including one brought by Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia that led to the decision on Thursday.

Through that case and others, the rule had...