Labrador Letter: Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Is Officially Defeated

Dear Friends,

Over the past few years, Idaho has been at the center of the national fight to protect women and girls in sports, in bathrooms, and in private spaces at school. You may be following our case protecting girls' sports, Little v. Hecox,where we are waiting on the Supreme Court to release its opinion any day now. But that isn't the only front in this fight. A separate and equally important battle just came to a close. The Biden administration tried to use Title IX, the federal law Congress passed to protect women and girls in education, to force gender identity mandates on every school in the country. Idaho went to court to stop it, and this month that case closed for good. The rule is dead and gone.

In April 2024, the Biden Department of Education published a sweeping rewrite of Title IX, the federal law Congress passed in 1972 to protect women and girls from discrimination in education. The rule redefined "sex discrimination" to include gender identity, which meant schools had to allow biological males into girls' bathrooms, locker rooms, and overnight accommodations, and compel teachers and staff to use whatever pronouns a student demanded. The Department dressed this up as civil rights enforcement. What it actually did was override state laws, expose schools to massive compliance costs, and put federal bureaucrats in charge of what your child's teacher is allowed to say.

Idaho joined Louisiana, Mississippi, and Montana as plaintiffs. Idaho has laws protecting girls' privacy and female sports, and this federal rule was designed to override them. A federal court in Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction blocking the rule from taking effect in our states. The Biden administration appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined in August 2024 to lift those injunctions-meaning they sided with us and against the Biden administration. Every court that considered the question reached the same conclusion: the Department had not shown it was likely to win.

The reason the rule failed is worth understanding, because it goes deeper than a procedural dispute about agency authority. Title IX was enacted in 1972 specifically to protect women and girls as a biological class. Congress used the word "sex" because the problem they were solving was discrimination against people based on their biological sex. Every dictionary definition of "sex" from that era referred to male or female. Schools accepted federal funding under those terms. The Biden administration's rule tried to sever the word from the biological reality it was written to address, substituting gender identity-a concept that didn't exist in the statute and that directly conflicts with the sex-separated spaces Title IX expressly permits. Courts found that redefinition incompatible with what Congress actually wrote and what schools were ever on notice they had agreed to.

In early 2025, a federal district court vacated the rule entirely, striking it from the books nationwide. A group of outside parties attempted to appeal that ruling, since the new Trump administration had no interest in defending Biden's rule. Both appeals were dismissed in May 2026. With no further risk of reversal, Idaho and our co-plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed our case this month. There was nothing left to litigate and we won.

The rule never governed a single Idaho school. That outcome required states willing to go to court on day one and make the case that the biological reality underlying Title IX doesn't change because a federal agency decides it should. Idaho did that, the courts agreed, and the protections for Idaho's families held.

Best regards,