The US Department of Education (DOE) announced on Monday that it will rescind agreements previous presidential administrations had with certain schools to interpret Title IX to include protections for transgender and gay students.

The DOE Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a press release that said it has terminated agreements with Cape Henlopen School District, Delaware Valley School District, Fife School District, La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College. Agreements were established under the former Biden and Obama administrations that interpreted Title IX to extend to transgender and gay students.

The OCR’s new interpretation removes federal requirements for the schools to continue faculty training on pronoun usage and allow students to use restrooms of their preferred gender identity. Explaining its decision, the OCR stated:

Resolution agreements are used by OCR to require schools to take specific actions to resolve noncompliance with federal civil rights law. Previous Administrations distorted the law contrary to its plain meaning to police discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” not sex, and imposed resolution agreements with no legal foundation, but rather, based on an ideologically-driven interpretation of Title IX. They illegally saddled school districts with Title IX violations for actions such as “improper use of preferred pronouns” or “asking questions about a student’s preferred gender.”

The change comes after a Kentucky federal court in January ruled that the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX was illegal.

Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richie said one of the purposes of this change is to protect female athletes, stating:

While previous Administrations launched Title IX investigations based on ‘misgendering,’ the Trump Administration is investigating allegations of girls and women being injured by men on their sports team or feeling violated by men in their intimate spaces…