"We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls," said US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
Page A3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 29 September 2026
TITLE IX, REVISED
Education Department pledges to relentlessly champion women, scraps their assault-survivor protections in the same filing.
As it ran on the front
"We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans," Education Secretary Linda McMahon said this week, announcing new rules on how schools handle sex discrimination, "and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls." It is a clean sentence, the kind a press office files next to a release, and this desk intends to defend it the way the department wrote it: plainly, relentlessly, all the way down the page.
Below the pledge sits the filing. The Education Department scrapped the Biden-era Title IX rule that had protected people who report sexual assault on campus — relentlessly, the secretary said, cham — no. That's not right. The word sits above a rule that removes protection from women who report assault, not one that adds it. Strike "relentlessly." Start the paragraph again.…
…(cont) The same filing narrows Title IX protections for LGBTQ people. This desk notes that following a court order is not the same thing as writing a press release promising to champion someone, but the two documents were filed within days of each other by the same office, so a reader could confuse them. This desk got them confused.
Eleven days before that, on September 18, a federal judge in a different case stopped the same Education Department from pulling roughly $600 million from teacher-training grants the administration had flagged for review. That ruling went against the department. This filing — the Title IX one — did not need a judge to stop it. Nobody has yet.
This desk was going to close by noting that the secretary's statement and the survivors it removes protection from are, in fact, part of the same relentless — the same filing. They are part of the same filing. The pledge is the header. The removal is the rule. Both are dated the same week. A press release can hold both sentences at once; that is not a contradiction, it is a filing cabinet. This desk regrets citing the word "relentlessly" a third time and will not do so again in this column.
“They put "relentlessly champion women" in the same envelope as the paper that pulls protection from women who report assault on campus — that's not a contradiction, that's the whole trick, promise in the header, take-away in the fine print, same filing. The LGBTQ kids lose their cover too, off a court ruling the department says its hands were tied by. Read past the press release or you're the mark.”
“Look, the rule change follows a federal court's ruling, the administration didn't invent this, they're complying with — with a decision that happens to remove protections, sure, but compliance is compliance, you can't fault the department for reading a court order. And the McMahon statement is about championing women and girls, that's a separate — okay, it's the same filing, same week practically, that's — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me. Next question.”
The receipts
The change follows a court ruling barring Title IX from protecting L.G.B.T.Q. people and has angered advocates for sexual assault survivors.
· Judge strikes down anti-DEI grant policy at Education Department from the morgue, 18 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.