The Education Department announced Monday it has formally rescinded the Biden-era Title IX interpretation that gave sex-based discrimination protections to students on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Schools now must go back to the Title IX code as held under the previous Trump administration in 2020, which the…
Page A11From§Eachthe noon edition — 28 September 2026
Education Department rescinds Title IX protections for LGBTQ students the same month a judge blocks its funding cuts.
As it ran on the front
Monday the Education Department made it official: the Title IX interpretation that extended sex-discrimination protections to students on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is rescinded. Schools go back to the Title IX code as it stood under the previous Trump administration, in 2020. Fox News's headline said the department "restores" that code — actually, that's Fox's word, not a quote out of Secretary McMahon's mouth. I don't have her saying restore. I have a headline. I'll use it anyway, because it's the department's preferred story, just wearing someone else's byline.
Restoration is a fine word for a shelf. It's a strange word for a department that, ten days before this restoration, lost in federal court. On September 18 a judge ruled the department cannot cut roughly $600 million in grants to teacher training programs — Teacher Quality Partnership, Supporting Effective Educator Development — money the administration had moved to slash back in February 2025, arguing the programs were too devoted to what it calls divisive ideologies. The receipts don't say why the judge ruled the way the judge ruled. They say the department tried to take the money and a federal judge said it can't. A department that just lost a fight over which grants it's allowed to kill is, this same month, restoring rules. Restoring — no. Reinstating. It reinstated old rules the same month a court told it its newer decisions don't hold up in front of a judge.…
…(cont) Nine days before that ruling, on September 9, the head of the department's special education office resigned, four months into the job, describing — in NPR's paraphrase — an agency overall that is morphing and shrinking. I don't have a caseload number. I don't have a wait time. I have a resignation and two verbs about the whole agency, not the office. I'll leave it there, because that's where the record leaves it.
Title IX, rescinded, framed as restoration. A grant cut, struck down nine days earlier. A special-education chief, gone nine days before that. Three items, three weeks, one department. If I were defending this docket end to end I'd tell you each one stands on its own facts. I'm defending this docket. They don't.
“They call it "restoring" rules like it's spring cleaning, but ten days earlier a judge told this same department it broke the law trying to strip $600 million from teacher training grants. Now the special-ed office is sitting empty at the top too. When an agency can't keep its own legal work straight, the kids waiting on it are the ones who eat the paperwork.”
“Look, the department went back to the 2020 rule — that's not radical, that's just the regulation that was already on the books. And the grant case, that's a totally separate matter, that's not the same department that a judge just told it was overstepping — did I say overstepping? I mean litigating. It's litigating. That's all that is.”
The receipts
Linda McMahon announced the formal rescission of Biden's 2024 Title IX rule, restoring Trump-era regulations on girls sports and gender identity.
· Judge strikes down anti-DEI grant policy at Education Department from the morgue, 18 Sep 2026
· Special education head at Education Department abruptly resigns from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.