School districts dinged during the previous administration for failing to enforce transgender pronouns won a reprieve Monday from the U.S. Department of Education.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights said Monday it has rescinded portions of Biden-era resolution agreements with five school districts and one college for offenses including “improper use of preferred pronouns” or “asking questions about a student’s preferred ’gender.’”
The violations were based on the Biden administration’s decision to expand the definition of Title IX to include gender identity. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bans sex discrimination in education.
“Today, the Trump Administration is removing the unnecessary and unlawful burdens that prior Administrations imposed on schools in its relentless pursuit of a radical transgender agenda,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey in a Monday statement.
The department issued a guidance in February 2025 saying that it will enforce Title IX based on the first Trump administration’s “2020 rule,” which held that the federal civil-rights law refers to biological sex, not gender identity.
“While previous Administrations launched Title IX investigations based on ’misgendering,’ the Trump Administration is investigating allegations of girls and women being injured by men on their sports team or feeling violated by men in their intimate spaces,” Ms. Richey said. “Today is yet another demonstration of the Trump Administration’s commitment to uphold the law, protect our students, and restore common sense. No longer will the federal government force educational institutions to violate the law or punish them for upholding it,” she added.
The five districts named in Monday’s announcement are the Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware; Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania; Fife School District in Washington; La Mesa-Spring Valley School District in California; and Sacramento City Unified in California.
The decision also applies to the 2023 resolution agreement reached with Taft College, a California community college, over a student who complained that faculty and staff “continued to refer to her by her previous male name and pronouns (misgendering her) on an almost daily basis.”
“The Student told OCR that her grades suffered and she experienced hair loss, anxiety, and depression, and felt suicidal on occasion as a result of being misnamed and misgendered repeatedly by College staff and faculty, especially when it occurred in front of other students,” said the department in a 2023 letter to the college.
The resolution agreement required Taft to revise its Title IX polices as well as issue a guidance and training memo with “specific examples of how the refusal to use a person’s preferred name and pronouns or repeated misuse of them may constitute harassment based on sex that can create a hostile academic environment under Title IX.”
Since then, however, several teachers have won First Amendment lawsuits against their schools for requiring them to use opposite-sex pronouns.
Last month, John Kluge, a former music teacher at Brownsburg High School in Indiana, received $650,000 to resolve his lawsuit against the Brownsburg Community School Corporation after he resigned rather than use transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns.
