By Joshua Arnold

The U.S. Department of Education has rescinded provisions of six resolution agreements that previous administrations forced upon schools for all the wrong reasons, the department announced Monday. The agreements with five school districts and one college required the schools to adopt trans-affirming pronoun policies and allow trans-identifying students to use opposite-sex restrooms.

“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. “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.”

Ironically, the reinterpretation of Title IX protects the feelings of trans-identifying students above the rights of women and girls, the ones for whose protection Title IX was originally enacted.

The resolution agreements impacted are those previous administrations entered into with Cape Henlopen School District (Del.), Delaware Valley School District (Penn.), Fife School District (Wash.), La Mesa-Spring Valley School District (Calif.), Sacramento City Unified (Calif.), and Taft College (Calif.).

Taking the last case as an example, the Biden administration in 2023 found Taft College in violation of Title IX after a trans-identifying student complained that school employees used the wrong pronouns. The resolution agreement required Taft to issue Title IX guidance 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.”

However, when the Biden administration issued formal guidance to reinterpret Title IX’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity, the guidance faced immediate court challenges and was eventually blocked in half the country. In August 2024, the Supreme Court upheld the injunctions issued in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits, confirming that the Biden administration’s guidance had exceeded the text of the law.

Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration repealed the Biden-era rule and returned to a rule issued in 2020, during the first Trump administration, which the Education Department said “properly safeguards against discrimination on the basis of sex.”

Yet some of the resolution agreements date back even further. The Southeastern Legal Foundation, which represents Delaware Valley School District, said the school district entered into an agreement with the Obama administration more than 10 years ago. In its final months, the Obama administration Department of Education issued a “dear colleague” letter to school districts, instructing them to interpret Title IX to cover sexual orientation and gender identity, without going through the formal rulemaking process.

“It was a woke and downright illegal policy that looked to misinterpret Title IX, issuing violations to students and parents who acknowledged their discomfort with sharing spaces with transgender students, claiming it as discrimination and harassment,” they declared.

Last fall, the foundation urged the Trump administration to rescind the outdated agreement, which was not even legal at its first adoption. It praised the administration’s reversal as a “huge win for Title IX.”

Yet the experience of Delaware Valley illustrates the sad reality that it often takes much longer to unravel bad policy than for those bad policies to make themselves felt. Federal policy decisions trickle down with individualized ramifications for thousands of school districts across the nation. Even when the first Trump administration came in and reversed the bad policy of the Obama administration, it overlooked some of the small ways that policy had trickled down to the district level. Delaware Valley School District, home to more than 4,000 students, did not see its effects reversed for another decade.

Although the Education Department announced the revised agreements on Monday, other reports suggest that these agreements have been happening gradually over the past several months. Delaware Valley received notice of the policy change in February, and the district has already voted to undo the policies it adopted in compliance with the Obama-era agreement.

On the other hand, Sacramento City Unified, another impacted district, recommitted on Monday “to the support of our LGBTQ+ students and staff.” These different reactions reflect the diversity in local situations, which is often steamrolled by federal policy, attached as strings to federal subsidies.

However, with an administration in Washington committed to applying Title IX as written, districts that choose to put women and girls at risk could find themselves on the wrong end of a Title IX finding once again. For now, at least, the heavy hand of the federal government is no longer compelling these six districts into pro-transgender policies with no basis in law.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

This piece originally appeared here.