The U.S Department of Education announced Friday that it will officially enforce the 2020 Title IX regulations, enacted during President Donald Trump’s first term, weeks after a federal judge struck down the contentious new regulations the Biden administration finalized last April.

The Biden administration’s Title IX regulations were previously blocked in 26 states and at hundreds of colleges, so many institutions have still been following the 2020 regulations. But at colleges that had moved forward with implementing the Biden regulations, “open Title IX investigations initiated under the 2024 Title IX Rule should be immediately reoriented to comport fully with the requirements of the 2020 Title IX Rule,” according to the new guidance.

The guidance released Friday was expected.

Many opponents of the Biden regulations primarily disagreed with their inclusion of explicit protections for transgender students. Under the 2024 rule, students were allowed to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity, a change that critics charged would harm cisgender women. A 2018 study found that inclusive bathroom policies weren’t related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in bathrooms or locker rooms, and that privacy and safety violations in those spaces “are exceedingly rare.”

The department officials said that, in reverting to the 2020 rule, the agency “will return to enforcing Title IX protections on the basis of biological sex in schools and on campuses.” Trump declared in an executive order signed on his first day in office that there are two sexes: male and female.

Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the department, wrote in a Dear Colleague letter that the federal judge who vacated the Biden rule “correctly repudiated the 2024 Title IX Rule’s expanded meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity.’”

Trainor added that the department will enforce Title IX consistent with Trump’s executive order.

The Office for Civil Rights recently opened an investigation into allegations that Denver Public Schools District discriminated “against its female students by converting a female restroom into an all-gender restroom in its largest high school,” according to a department news release.

Although the guidance was anticipated, advocates for victims of sexual violence condemned the decision nevertheless. The 2020 regulations have been criticized for making it more difficult for victims to report sexual harassment as well as for implementing several due process requirements for individuals accused of sexual assault, such as allowing them to cross-examine their accuser, a process that advocates call traumatizing for assault survivors. Additionally, the regulations limit Title IX’s jurisdiction to incidents that take place on campus and more narrowly define sexual harassment as compared to the Biden rule.

“The 2020 Title IX rule fails students, who are now at greater risk of harassment and discrimination. This is an incredibly disappointing decision that will leave many survivors of sexual violence, LGBTQ+ students, and pregnant and parenting students without the accommodations critical to their ability to learn and attend class safely,” Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at Know Your IX, a college sexual violence prevention organization, said in a statement.

But conservative leaders lauded the announcement.

“The previous administration’s desire to cater to special interest groups has left women and girls vulnerable in the classroom,” said Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and the chair of the education and workforce committee, in a statement. “These attempts to re-define womanhood to include biological men have cost women the protections and freedoms that they have worked decades to build. The guidance issued by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights corrects this wrong, and our students are now safer because of it.”