Fifty-four years ago, Congress passed Title IX, and America made a promise to girls who had been told to wait, shrink, settle, or stay off the field. The law didn't need a thousand pages to say something clear; no student in a federally funded education program could be shut out, denied benefits, or discriminated against “on the basis of sex.”
The law became part of the Education Amendments of 1972 on June 23, 1972. Late Reps. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii), Edith Green (D-Ore.), and the late Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) helped push the cause through Congress.
Their work opened doors for women in classrooms, labs, scholarships, locker rooms, and athletic programs that had long treated female opportunity like a favor instead of a right. From the U.S. Department of Education:
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. Title IX states “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance[.]” All federal agencies that provide grants of financial assistance are required to enforce Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate. ED gives grants of financial assistance to schools and colleges and to certain other entities, including vocational rehabilitation programs and libraries.
Examples of the types of discrimination that are covered under Title IX include but are not limited to: sex-based harassment; sexual violence; pregnancy discrimination; the failure to provide equal athletic opportunity; sex-based discrimination in a school’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses and programs; discriminatory application of dress code policies and/or enforcement; and retaliation.
Title IX's original moral force came from its simplicity; sex meant sex, and girls and women deserved equal treatment because they were girls and women, not because federal lawyers could bend the word into whatever politics demanded years later.
The left once knew how to speak that language; it celebrated Title IX when the law helped women gain access to programs that had ignored them.
Then the law became a weapon; schools learned to fear Title IX offices as much as they respected the law. Accused students often faced campus processes that carried life-changing consequences without the safeguards Americans expect from any system that claims to seek truth.
Women's sports, built through decades of sacrifices, became another battlefield once gender identity was pushed into a statute written to protect women from sex discrimination.
Former President Joe Biden's Education Department tried to lock that change into federal regulation in 2024. The rule expanded Title IX enforcement to include gender identity, then collapsed in court.
On Jan. 9, 2025, U.S. District Judge Danny Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky vacated the Biden rule nationwide. President Donald Trump's Department of Education returned to enforcing the 2020 Title IX rule.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has made the Trump administration's position clear; the department says the 2020 rule protects students on the basis of biological sex, strengthens due process, and restores Title IX to its proper purpose. The same agency has opened investigations into schools over policies that allow males to compete in women's sports or enter women-only intimate spaces.
President Trump also signed an order in February 2025 called “Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports.” The order directed federal agencies to protect female athletic opportunities and female locker rooms under Title IX.
In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.
Moreover, under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (Title IX), educational institutions receiving Federal funds cannot deny women an equal opportunity to participate in sports. As some Federal courts have recognized, “ignoring fundamental biological truths between the two sexes deprives women and girls of meaningful access to educational facilities.” Tennessee v. Cardona, 24-cv-00072 at 73 (E.D. Ky. 2024). See also Kansas v. U.S. Dept. of Education, 24-cv-04041 at 23 (D. Kan. 2024) (highlighting “Congress’ goals of protecting biological women in education”).
Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy. It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
Critics called it cruel; many parents, coaches, and female athletes saw something far more basic: the federal government admitting that women's sports can't survive if women are told to surrender the category.
Title IX has been praised, stretched, ignored, and used as a bludgeon. The left treats it like sacred text when it can punish schools, coaches, and students. It treats the same law like an inconvenience when women ask for fair competition, privacy, and safety.
A law written to protect women shouldn't be used to shame women into silence. A statute born from exclusion shouldn't become the tool that pushes women aside under new language and old pressure. Title IX didn't fail women; political opportunists failed Title IX.
Fifty-four years later, the country doesn't need a new civil rights vocabulary to see the old truth. Women fought for their own place in American education.
They shouldn't have to fight the federal government to keep it.
