[BOISE] – Following two years of legal defenses of Idaho’s statutes led by Attorney General Raúl Labrador, President Trump’s Department of Education reversed the Biden-era rule re-defining sex discrimination to include “gender identity.” The Department will now be enforcing the previous 2020 guidelines for Title IX, which protects opportunities for girls and women across K-12, colleges, and universities.
This move from the Trump Administration reinforces a November court ruling from the United States Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky striking down the 2024 Biden Administration’s re-write of Title IX as “unlawful,” after Republican attorneys general across the country filed multiple suits challenging the rule. In addition to giving biological males access to women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, the 2024 Title IX re-write also included a mandated use of preferred pronouns which the attorneys general held as a clear violation of free speech.
President Trump also signed an Executive Order on Wednesday afternoon that bans males from playing on sports teams that do not match their biological sex. The Order is titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” This Order is preceded by Idaho’s 2020 HB500, the first-in-the-nation law that banned men from playing in women’s sports. Labrador is also defending a challenge to this law in Hecox v. Little.
“This is a fundamental rejection of the radical agenda that had been pushed onto communities and schools across our country,” said Attorney General Labrador. “We fought back against the Biden-Harris Administration’s illegal and unconscionable re-write of Title IX and we fought for the safety of our female student athletes. These are huge wins for the safety of Idaho girls, students’ privacy and free speech, and women’s sports across our country.”
The decision from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights follows an Executive Order from President Trump on January 20th which ordered all agencies and departments within the Executive Branch to “enforce all sex-protective laws to promote [the] reality” that there are “two sexes, male and female,” and “these sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”