How Title IX became a tool of America's conservative movement

For more than 50 years, the U.S. civil rights law known as Title IX has been a bulwark against sex discrimination in education. Covering students from kindergarten through university, it’s been the basis for landmark cases involving campus rape, gender bias in standardized testing and unequal funding for women’s athletics.

Conservative activist Nicole Neily has been wielding Title IX in a different way. Backed early on by donors including billionaire investor John Paulson, Neily has been calling on the Department of Education to investigate school policies supporting transgender students, arguing they erode Title IX protections for women. Her group is one of the conservative movement’s most prolific filers of Title IX complaints — it recently took aim at Princeton University and Yale University — and its message is resonating in Washington.

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, almost all of the Education Department’s public statements about Title IX have focused on transgender issues. Its online database of newly opened Title IX investigations hasn’t been updated since Trump returned to the White House, and the only sexual-assault investigation the agency has publicly acknowledged initiating involved an alleged attack by a transgender wrestler on a female student in Washington state.

The shift in focus coincides with a sharp pullback in Title IX enforcement overall. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights resolved 177 complaints last year, compared with more than 500 in each of the two prior years. More than half the division’s field offices were closed as part of a broader gutting of the federal government, and its staffing contracted by roughly a third to about 400 people.

Those cuts, along with the emphasis on transgender issues, mean that sexual harassment and assault cases traditionally addressed by Title IX are being neglected, critics of the administration say.

“It's a nightmare,” said Esther Warkov, co-founder of the nonprofit Stop Sexual Assault in Schools. Sexual assault and harassment harms millions of students daily, she said. “It’s derailing students’ education and causing life-long trauma.”

In February, the National Women’s Law Center and more than 100 other advocacy groups wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Kimberly Richey, the agency’s assistant secretary for civil rights, urging the government to enforce Title IX by investigating and resolving stalled complaints involving sexual violence. They criticized the civil rights office for failing to act on those cases while prioritizing probes into transgender students.

The Education Department didn’t return messages seeking comment.

Neily draws a distinction between the types of complaints her group files and the kinds of cases her critics say are being ignored. “What we're concerned with right now is that there are state actors themselves, be it a school district, be it a university, that are the ones that are violating their own policies and perpetrating the discrimination themselves,” she said. That’s different from asking the federal government to adjudicate, for example, a campus rape allegation between students, she said.

Neily, who helped turn critical race theory into a lightning rod in the U.S. culture wars, started the nonprofit Defending Education in 2021 to fight what she describes as ideological overreach by U.S. schools.

In January, her group filed a complaint against Yale for offering male and mixed-gender bathrooms on some co-ed dorm floors without offering female-only facilities, arguing this violated Title IX by denying women equal access to sex-segregated spaces. It filed a similar complaint against Princeton in November, alleging female students in two residential colleges were forced to share gender-neutral bathrooms with limited provisions for privacy. Yale and Princeton declined to comment.

Neily’s group has strong ties to the Education Department. Richey used to be a senior fellow at the nonprofit. Noah Pollak, a friend of Neily’s who advised her group, was named a senior adviser by the Education Department last year. And Neily, who has testified to Congressional committees and spoken at White House events, was seated with McMahon’s family at the education secretary’s confirmation hearing last year.

The Bradley Impact Fund, which has donated around $1.5 million to Defending Education, said the group’s efforts to preserve the original intent of Title IX — eliminating sex-based discrimination — “have been absolutely critical in the fight to protect women’s and girls’ spaces.”

Mobilizing

With a budget that topped $6.4 million last year, Defending Education investigates tips submitted mainly by parents and sometimes by teachers or school administrators. The group receives about 50 tips a week, Neily said. To vet the complaints, she and her team of 20 employees try to track down supporting evidence such as emails, homework assignments, videos or written policies, sometimes filing public records requests to do so.

A fraction of the tips lead to action, which may include filing a federal Title IX complaint, drafting a lawsuit or lending support to existing cases by submitting amicus briefs. Some of the group’s complaints have led to government probes. In March, the Education Department civil rights office said it opened an investigation into whether a New Hampshire school district violated Title IX for allegedly allowing transgender students to use female restrooms and locker rooms. Defending Education had filed a complaint against the district last August.

Fighting Title IX complaints can be costly. A public school district can spend as much as $10,000 for basic defense against a complaint, while universities can pay five times that amount. If there's litigation, costs can rise to at least $250,000, and if cases go to trial, they can be in excess of $1 million, according to Andrew T. Miltenberg, a lawyer at Nesenoff & Miltenberg LLP in New York who specializes in Title IX cases.

Not all of Defending Education’s cases involve Title IX. One of its biggest victories to date came in a lawsuit it filed in 2023 against an Ohio school district that required students to use others’ preferred pronouns, with noncompliance subject to penalties up to expulsion. A federal appeals court ruled that the Olentangy Local School District Board of Education’s policy likely violated the First Amendment. Neily said her group is now in settlement talks with the district.

Neily’s Early Donors

Neily declined to discuss her funders. Paulson donated funds in 2022, while New York hedge fund manager Joe Edelman gave money in 2021 and 2022, according to tax filings. A spokesman for Paulson declined to comment, while Edelman didn’t reply to requests for comment. Another early backer was DonorsTrust, the biggest charitable fund channeling anonymous donations to conservative causes. It has sent Neily’s group about $2.4 million.

Lawson Bader, who runs DonorsTrust, described Neily as an “aggressive” mobilizer who was early to tap into parents’ frustrations with what their children were being exposed to at school. “Older organizations now pay attention to Nicki, seek her advice and use her information,” he said.

Neily, 45, began her career in communications at the libertarian Cato Institute and has worked on Washington policy issues for the past 20 years. She works from her colonial-style townhouse just across the Potomac River in Virginia, where in addition to filing Title IX complaints she lobbies for conservative positions on matters of race, antisemitism and free speech.

A high-energy and fast-talking mother of two, Neily said she typically wakes up at 6:30 am and works until around 10 pm. She tears up admitting she finds it difficult to break away from work and relax. “I don't know how to shut off,” she said.

Neily said her work isn’t motivated by religion. Nor is she opposed to gay rights, she said, noting she was part of conservative efforts supporting same-sex marriage. Driving her is a sense that American education has drifted away from its mandate by imposing beliefs, compelling speech and sidelining parents, including when it comes to complying with Title IX, she said.

“We have clearly watched this issue evolve in many ways that I think a lot of us never saw coming, like to the point of exclusion, to the language policing the pronouns,” Neily said.

Disproportionate Focus

According to the Williams Institute, a research group at the UCLA School of Law, some 2.1 million adults in the U.S. identify as transgender, accounting for less than 1% of the adult population. Among kids from 13 to 17 years old, 724,000 identify as transgender, representing 3.3% of the U.S. youth population.

The numbers suggest transgender people — and school policies that accommodate them — are being disproportionately targeted and used as political scapegoats, say critics of conservative activist groups.

“They're trying to turn Title IX on its head and use it as a weapon, not to prevent discrimination against students but to greenlight discrimination against transgender students,” said Brandon Wolf, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

Meanwhile, with less federal attention on more traditional kinds of Title IX cases, groups like Stop Sexual Assault in Schools are advising women to pursue complaints with state and local school officials instead.

Neily is hoping for more action at the local level, too. She said more parents should be addressing trans-related policies directly with schools and districts. To that end, Neily said she’s been training grassroots groups to help others better understand how local systems work and to use mechanisms like state civil rights complaints that are rarely used by conservatives. Those efforts are rooted in her broader argument about Title IX’s scope.

“It's sex-based discrimination,” Neily said. “It's not a law designed for women.”

Scope of Protections

Neily’s involvement in Title IX issues traces back to 2009, when she worked at a group examining issues including equal treatment in school athletics. She said she was upset to see male wrestling teams cut to create gender parity at schools where no equivalent female teams existed — something that she said strayed from Title IX’s intent.

Remote learning during the Covid pandemic was another turning point. As parents got a better glimpse into what their children were being taught at school, they were alarmed to see lesson plans that included discussions of gender identity, Neily said.

In 2022, the Biden administration proposed expanding Title IX protections to include gender identity. This prompted schools to preemptively update their policies before the rule was finalized in 2024, Neily said. Measures to include transgender students were in practice disadvantageous to others, Neily said. Sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms were modified to become communal, undermining privacy for girls, while students were expected to use preferred pronouns, a form of compelled speech, she argued.

“They were making a conscious decision to sacrifice the First Amendment on the altar of Title IX,” Neily said. “Things got wildly out of sync.”

After Trump returned to office in 2025, the Education Department restored the scope of Title IX to its pre-2024 protections. Neily said she’s been collaborating with another conservative group, the Defense of Freedom Institute, to push Congress to pass a law so that in the future, Title IX guidance doesn’t change when administrations do.

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—With assistance from Amanda L. Gordon and Liam Knox.