Defending Education’s long-running lawsuit against the Biden-era Title IX rule, brought with other plaintiffs, has ended in victory. In related cases in other federal appeals courts, groups that had tried to join those cases to defend the rule and win biological males access to female-only spaces dropped their appeals. That ended the last efforts to defend the rule, which other courts had found likely violated civil rights law, administrative law, and the Constitution.
As a result, DE and its co-plaintiffs asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to dismiss their own appeal. On May 27, 2026, the court granted the joint motion, dismissing the appeal as moot, meaning there was no longer a live dispute to decide, and erasing the lower court’s earlier denial of a preliminary injunction.
Read the court’s full order below:
