Earlier this year, LGBTQ+ students and victims of campus sexual assault gained new protections under the Biden-Harris Administration’s finalized revision of Title IX regulations.
The rules – released April 2024 after being announced in 2022 – represented a landmark effort to solidify discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity as violations of Title IX as well as to counteract the Trump Administration’s stricter ways of defining and determining sexual harassment.
Elana Redfield
Separate rules
The exclusion of rules about trans athletes was no surprise. The Biden-Harris Administration stated in 2022 that it would address the matter of discrimination in sex-separate athletics in another set of proposed rules, which it published and opened up to public comment about a year later.
This other set of regulations – proposed in April 2023 – bars schools from implementing blanket bans on transgender athletes but allows schools to put up limitations on eligibility that are in service of “important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” These limitations would also have to account for the sport in question, and competition and education level, along with having to “minimize harms” to the students affected.
“When they put out this new proposed [athletics] rule, it still was a little bit surprising to me that it didn’t explicitly come right out and say that certain kinds of separation are categorically discriminatory,” says Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the UCLA Williams Institute, a think tank and research center on LGBT public policy. “It didn’t say the exclusion of trans people is discriminatory explicitly. It said, ‘if you’re going to do that, you have to have really good reason basically.’”
