Title IX Is a Political Football. Enough.

In August 2024, after four long years of advocates, students and supporters pushing the Biden administration to roll back the Trump administration’s 2020 Title IX regulations, the Department of Education finally enacted new regulations. What we got was a mixed bag; they fixed some key problems with Trump regulations largely criticized by student survivors and other educational leaders, such as requiring complainants and respondents to participate in live hearings and allowing for cross-examination of complainants during these hearings. In another positive step, they expanded sex discrimination protections to include gender identity.

On the other hand, the new regulations implemented a sweeping (and long critiqued) mandated reporting directive that requires virtually all university employees to report any knowledge of sexual harassment, discrimination or retaliation, regardless of whether the student wants to report—even if the events happened prior to the student enrolling at the university (i.e., if a sexual assault happened in high school).

This far-reaching mandated reporting directive has effectively eliminated any meaningful progress to carve out exemptions, with a widely lauded policy at the University of Oregon now eliminated due to the new regulations. These policies go against what survivors and advocates fought to change when Biden’s administration began accepting public comments on the new regulations. Survivors and advocates clearly stated that we should not require mandatory reporting and should instead follow survivor-centered and -directed choices. As many pointed out, mandated reporting is infantilizing to survivors and has a chilling effect on disclosures of sexual assault. Students will refrain from coming forward if they know almost every university employee is obligated to report what they say to the Title IX office.

As if these problems were not enough, the Biden Title IX rules are currently not being implemented at universities in 26 U.S. states due to Republican pushback and legal action against protections for trans students—particularly trans women in sports. As such, Title IX is now being enforced on a piecemeal level; trans students and employees are legally protected in some states and not others. Even though much of the resistance to anti-trans legislation has been focused (rightly so) on the Republican camp, Democrats deserve some of this ire for not having put up any meaningful challenge to anti-trans rhetoric or legislation.

Indeed, Kamala Harris on the campaign trail refused to take a definitive stance on protecting trans people and their right to gender-affirming health care, with a repetitive and meaningless response of “we should follow the law.” She had no comment as to whether the law is immoral or unjust. This abandonment of transgender people (including students), while not new, has new salience under a second Trump administration where the rights and protections of trans students (and transgender people in public life at large) are in the crosshairs.

It is difficult to know right now what exactly will happen to Title IX under Trump 2.0, although it is safe to say there will be no progressive march forward. Some suspect that Trump may simply go back to the 2020 regulations, but it is possible in his descent into open fascism and wholesale elimination of the Department of Education that Title IX protections and any meaningful enforcement would cease to exist.

The constant yo-yoing effect of Title IX regulations between Republican and Democratic administrations has not made survivors or campuses safer. Instead, discrimination, violence and retaliation have become questions of legal liability. Rather than figuring out how to actually protect marginalized students and employees on campus we have seen both political parties present solutions imbued with carceral logic that extend surveillance and further the technocratic rationalization of modern-day criminal legal codes. In short, Title IX reforms have offered students far too little in the way of safety. And now it is too late. The clock has run all the way down and we are officially out of time.

The question remains then: What do we in higher education, and beyond, do? Do we continue to allow basic human rights such as access to education and the right to feel safe in classrooms and on our campuses to be decided by political leaders who rarely have the courage to enact truly equitable policies? Do we simply throw our hands up and just “follow the law,” as Harris suggested we should do? Or do we call into question the utility of the law to keep us safe and begin to strategize and organize beyond it?

Of course, we suggest we do the latter. We suggest turning to works of abolitionist scholars and activists like Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Angela Davis, Andrea Ritchie and other abolitionist feminists who have long warned us about the limits of relying heavily on laws to protect the most marginalized. Basic human rights like the safe access to education should not be up for debate. Higher education employees and students need to come together in solidarity to create systems of support for survivors of sexual violence, harassment and discrimination that do not rely on Title IX regulations and piecemeal enforcement.

Instead, these systems of support could involve creating community care, which would involve solidarity across faculty, students and staff; labor organizing in higher education that takes up the mantle of addressing sexual harassment and gender discrimination; and/or implementing transformative justice approaches to respond to violence. We must truly take up the mantle of collective action, protecting those most vulnerable, and refuse to be bulldozed by fascism. We need to rediscover the tradition of feminist organizing on campuses and show up for one another in radical and new ways. We need to refuse to follow unjust laws. We keep us safe, and we can find the answers together.