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The U.S. Department of Education's recent changes to Title IX rules have sparked debate over their implications for campus sexual assault investigations and LGBTQ student protections. While the move, which reinstates regulations from the first Trump administration, may appear to be a formality, it solidifies an approach to handling sexual assault and harassment that many advocates argue harms survivors.

Critics contend that the shift could also pave the way for the removal of protections for LGBTQ students under federal civil rights law.

The department's decision to formally rescind Title IX regulations adopted in 2024 under President Joe Biden was not unexpected, according to advocates and experts. However, the effort to clarify the current status of Title IX rules may also hint at the agency's more ambitious regulatory priorities, including defining sex in federal law. The Biden-era regulations rescinded on Monday had already been overturned by a federal judge in 2025.

These regulations had previously declared that gender identity is covered by Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs receiving federal support. This move was welcomed by LGBTQ students and their supporters. In contrast, the 2020 rules developed during the first Trump administration, which the Education Department's announcement reinstates, treat sex as a binary classification and do not define sex.

The 2020 rules were widely criticized by advocates for survivors of sexual assault, who argued that they would make it more challenging for victims to prove their cases and would give more rights to the accused compared to previous rules. The Education Department's announcement did not explicitly address the impact of these rules on harassment investigations, but critics pointed out that the announcement followed a lawsuit alleging severe accusations of rape at Cornell University.

The university's investigation of the case through the Title IX process allegedly resulted in weak sanctions for the accused students.

The most significant outcome of the Education Department's Monday announcement may be that the rules, which schools have been "expected to follow since basically the early days of this administration," will now be clearly reflected in all relevant contexts. Kayleigh Baker, a consultant with TNG Consulting and a member of the Association of Title IX Administrators' advisory board, noted that the 2020 regulations focus on the process of investigating Title IX complaints, particularly allegations of harassment and assault.

The department's rules require that both K-12 and higher education institutions inform anyone accused of a policy violation of the allegations against them. They also establish minimum wait times for hearings on violations of harassment and assault, which can significantly prolong the resolution time in sexual misconduct cases, particularly for K-12 schools. Overall, these rules have been followed by schools for some time.

Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, assisted in developing the 2020 Title IX rules while working at the Education Department. She argued that the department's process protects "both men and women" and ensures that allegations are taken seriously and with the necessary gravity.

However, Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice for the National Women’s Law Center, highlighted that survivors have reported the department's prescribed Title IX investigation process as traumatic and unfair.

The Cornell incident further raises questions about the impact of the Education Department's prescribed Title IX investigation process. Patel emphasized that reverting to the 2020 Title IX rules would create less safe campuses, remove obligations for educational institutions to respond to sexual harassment, and lead to fewer survivors wanting to report due to their perception of the Trump administration's 2020 rule as not intended to protect them.

Parshall Perry also mentioned that shifting to the 2020 Title IX rules sets the stage for the Education Department to redefine the definition of sex in Title IX, stating that the department has proposed that Title IX's definition of sex should "refer exclusively to an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female."

However, if the administration attempts to define sex in the civil rights law through rulemaking, there is currently nothing preventing the next administration from rolling it back. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that states can ban transgender students from participating in women's and girls' sports, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing that the plain meaning of "sex" in Title IX "cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex." Some conservatives expressed disappointment that the court did not go further in defining sex.

Parshall Perry argued that the only way to end the regulatory "whiplash" experienced by Title IX is for Congress to define sex under the law. However, this politically sensitive proposal has not gained much traction in Capitol Hill. She noted that the U.S. Department of Education is currently caught in a cycle of regulatory ping-pong, back and forth between different sets of rules.