Trump Admin Finally Erases Biden’s Crazy Trans Sports Agenda

Last week, the Education Department finished a job the courts started.

It formally repealed the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule and restored the 2020 regulations, so the federal rulebook now says what any elementary school gym teacher could have told you for free.

Secretary Linda McMahon put it in plain English that “boys and men are in boys and men’s sports and girls are in theirs.”

Protecting young girls starts with keeping the girls’ category real. Sex-separated sports exist because males and females do not compete on equal physical terms after puberty.

Blur the category, and you erase the opportunity it was built to protect.

I ran the hurdles and the 400-meter in high school and college, and I later coached girls’ sprinters and hurdlers.

I’m not theorizing. I’ve watched a teenager train for years to win a race by a tenth of a second. A hurdler who shaves 0.3 seconds off her time has rebuilt her season. She earned it with hundreds of cold repetitions, and nobody on that track needed a legal brief to understand why the number has to be earned against the right field.

Let’s start with what Monday’s action did and didn’t do, because precision is scarce in this debate.

The Biden rule was already dead. A federal judge in Kentucky vacated it nationwide on Jan. 9, 2025, in State of Tennessee v. Cardona, reasoning that discrimination on the basis of sex means discrimination between male and female.

Then on June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. B.P.J. that states may keep girls’ teams just for girls.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the Title IX regulations allowed separate teams “precisely because of the biological differences between the sexes.”

Today’s rule tidies the Code of Federal Regulations. The law had already moved. The Court also treated safety and competitive fairness as interests a state may protect when it draws that line.

The stakes show up on podiums. At the 2022 NCAA swimming championships, Lia Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle and became the first self-proclaimed transgender athlete to win a Division I national title.

Thomas also tied Riley Gaines for fifth in the 200.

Gaines has said she left the meet with no trophy. Fifth place isn’t the prize anyone dreams about, but it beats a handshake and a story you tell at hearings for the next three years.

Roster spots, scholarships, records, and podiums are zero-sum. Every one handed out under a mixed gender category is one a girl doesn’t get.

Aristotle held that justice treats like cases alike and unlike cases differently. The Greeks did not need a Federal Register notice to grasp that a category exists for a reason. It took Washington a district judge and nine justices to rediscover it.

Boxing has weight classes. Nobody calls those weight classes bigotry, and nobody lets a heavyweight into the flyweight bracket in the name of inclusion.

In my expert witness work on fiduciary duty, I see the same failure in court.

The party in charge forgot whom they were supposed to serve. Schools, athletic associations, and agencies owe something close to that duty to the girls in their care. A policy that puts a theory ahead of their safety and their shot at winning breaks it.

Fiduciary law asks one question when trust fails: Who paid the price? Here the answer is a 16-year-old with a competitive nature and the hope of a scholarship who never got a vote on the policy.

Critics will say Monday’s rule was housekeeping, and they’re right. They’ll insist that transgender students deserve safety and dignity, and they’re right about that too.

I was bullied as a kid, and I have no patience for anyone who harasses anyone. Yet protection from harassment and eligibility for a protected category are separate questions.

The 2020 rules that returned this week are mostly a framework for how schools respond to harassment and assault complaints. A school can discipline a bully and still run a team just for girls.

Now the work shifts from courts to communities.

States and school districts should put sex-based eligibility in writing since the Supreme Court has cleared the way. Congress should write the definition of sex into Title IX itself, because a regulation is something an incoming administration can change.

The Education Department should meanwhile keep enforcing, and it is already pursuing Maine, California, and Minnesota over allowing males in girls’ sports.

Athletic associations should publish eligibility rules before each season so that girls and parents plan around a fixed category and never a moving target. Parents can ask for the policy in writing and then read it, which puts them ahead of most bureaucrats.

Epictetus taught that wise people sort what is in their control from what is not. Rulebooks are in our control. So is the starting line. Every girl who sets an alarm for a 5 a.m. practice is trusting adults to keep the race honest.

I raised three sons, so I know exactly how fast and strong teenage boys get. That’s a reason to cheer them in their own races and let girls win theirs.

On the track, the lines are painted to separate the runners for their safety. Let’s keep the line between boys and girls as well.

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