At the most basic level, the Trump administration’s new rule will make it harder than ever for survivors to understand their legal rights—and if survivors can’t understand their rights, it’s very unlikely that they will use them. The new rule is long and difficult to comprehend. While Title IX itself is only a single sentence—“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”—the new rule is contained in a 2,033 page document. To put this in perspective, the Obama administration’s guidance was 53 pages and the Trump administration’s first pass at the policy was 38. For students trying to access their rights, this matters. Much of our national conversation about Title IX can be traced back to student survivors taking the law into their own hands. Without any legal training, student activists taught each other about their Title IX rights and brought lawsuits against the schools they believed had violated them. That type of advocacy becomes a lot more difficult when the policy on the books is so needlessly lengthy and contradictory that even experts on campus sexual violence have struggled to understand the nuances of the rule.
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