Over A Dozen States Not Compliant With Trump’s Title IX, Report Says

Non-profit Defending Education released on Wednesday an online tracker to determine which states are not in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”

The report uses Trump’s executive order as “current interpretation” of Title IX, an amendment to the Education Amendments of 1972 which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.

Title IX also mandates that all schools receiving federal funding must have equity in sports for girls and women, with all-women sports teams and leagues to compete in.

The controversy that Trump’s executive order, issued on Feb. 5, 2025, came down on was whether or not transgender women are included in Title IX. Trump’s order says they are not, and any state who accepts them into women’s sports cannot receive federal funding.

The Defending Education (DE) report found that 32 states are compliant with Trump’s executive order and 18 are non-compliant. 

Compliant states include nearly every state Trump carried in the 2024 election, minus Michigan and plus New Hampshire and Virginia. Most of these states had already banned transgender women from participating in women’s sports before the executive order, largely between 2021 and 2023. Idaho was the first state to place a ban in 2020. The most recent states, Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, all enacted bans after Trump’s executive order in 2025.

Non-compliant states include the remaining 18 in the union, most of which are firm Democratic strongholds, save for Michigan. Washington, D.C., is also non-compliant, according to DE. Some of these states, such as California, Maryland, and Massachusetts, have issued clear and specific statements in defiance of Trump’s order, while others, such as Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, have simply carried on using their existing policies regardless of the order, the report says.

Critics of Trump’s executive order, including the American Civil Liberties Union, argue these bans infringe on transgender students’ rights to participate in sports. Many also allege the issue is blown out of proportion compared to how many transgender athletes there actually are.

In a December 2024 Senate hearing, NCAA President Charlie Baker was asked how many athletes participate in the NCAA and how many transgender athletes he is aware of. Baker said there were 510,000 athletes total and less than 10 transgender athletes.

A transgender athlete in West Virginia, 11-year-old runner Becky Pepper-Jackson, was barred from running at her school and subsequently sued the West Virginia State Board of Education. A federal court found that Pepper-Jackson’s Title IX rights had been violated. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which announced in July that it will hear the case.

Defending Education identifies as a grassroots, non-partisan non-profit that “fights to restore schools at all levels from activists imposing harmful agendas,” according to its website. The organization is often used by some Republican politicians as sources of data, such as by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).

Robert Pondiscio, senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, praised DE as having “done important and often brave work exposing ideological overreach in K–12 schools,” though the June 2025 article this was published in was criticizing a particular categorization error by DE. However, Maurice Cunningham, a political science professor at University of Massachusetts, wrote a piece in 2021 accusing DE of being an “astroturf,” a false or artificial grassroots movement. 

Cunningham cited extremely low membership in local partners, DE president Nicole Neily’s former membership in conservative institutions such as the Cato Institute, and connections to the “Koch network” of right-wing foundations funded by billionaire Charles Koch in her argument.