Title IX was game-changer for women. But is the government still playing by its own rules?
In "Title Waves," the latest feature from Long Lead, Kim Cross reports how two courageous Hawaiian women, nearly 50 years apart, fought for equality and won.
In February 2018, a girls water polo team was practicing in the ocean, dodging coral and foot-high waves because their school couldn’t — or wouldn’t — get them pool time. Seeing the boys’ sports teams getting support they didn’t have, they complained to the school. When those pleas went ignored, they did something that ultimately changed the lives of women across the U.S.: They sued.
In Title Waves, the latest feature from Long Lead, narrative journalist Kim Cross reports on how two Hawaiian women — 50 years apart — leveled the playing field for women in education. A stirring braided narrative about the fight for gender equality in the Civil Rights Era and the continuing need for vigilance today, it tells the stories of Patsy Mink, the trailblazing congresswoman who authored Title IX, and Ashley Badis, a water polo player with a rocket arm who simply wanted her school to play by the rules.
“Of the federal laws protecting women’s rights, Title IX has proved one of the most powerful and enduring,” Cross writes in Title Waves. Her account describes how hard and strategically Mink worked to get the law passed and how well the statute has held up since. At just 37 words, Title IX is short but has proven itself to be incredibly robust:
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.
As Cross notes, Title IX was passed in June 1972 “during the same 12-month period in which Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification and the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade.”
“Learning all of this history made me feel a debt of gratitude for the women who paved the way and fought the fights to change the world I inherited,” Cross tells Parker Molloy in a behind-the-scenes peek in tomorrow’s issue of Depth Perception.
But with the ERA failing to be ratified by enough states for it to become a federal amendment and the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Title IX is now the only legal protection for women from that time still standing. And as the Trump administration has turned the political tide against the landmark law, it’s fair to wonder how long it will persevere.
Since President Trump returned to office, the administration has used Title IX as a cudgel against the transgender community and higher education institutions it’s seeking to curb. The president has issued multiple executive orders concerning gender and enforced them through Title IX investigations from California colleges to Massachusetts grade schools, seeking to take action on alleged infringements from before Trump retook office in January 2025.
There has been legal pushback to these actions, including by California State University, which has had its federal funding threatened over claims that it allowed a transgender woman to play on its volleyball team. Cal State calls the federal investigation “lawless overreach.” Additionally, in April 2026, a federal judge ruled in favor of Maine’s Department of Education, which is being sued by the federal government for similar reasons. The state accused the federal government of pursuing “selective enforcement” and the district court ruled there was evidence of potential “bad faith” by the Trump administration.
Whatever the politics involved, the result of these cases (and the administration’s cuts to the Department of Education) is a federal government that’s diverting resources away from Title IX enforcement as it was originally intended by Mink and her contemporaries. These moves have impacted countless women like Badis and her teammates, who did not know they had rights to equal opportunity in education, which includes high school sports, before their fight for pool time began. And even if they had, the backlog of complaints is growing, causing high school students to effectively “age out” of legal resolutions. As Cross reports in Title Waves:
The Office of Civil Right’s track record of resolving Title IX complaints in a timely fashion is now abysmal. The OCR is legally mandated to resolve 80% of complaints within 180 days, but it has struggled to do so for more than a decade. The volume of complaints has more than doubled since 2015, and the staff hasn’t grown accordingly. In March 2025, half that staff was eliminated. Those who didn’t lose their jobs went from handling dozens of cases to hundreds.
“They’re being asked to do the impossible,” says Linda Mangel, a former director of enforcement who worked at the OCR for 15 years. “Before March 2025, OCR staffing was already stretched beyond capacity to promptly resolve complaints; now it is altogether broken.”
It’s diminishing support and policies like these that have created a system where a team of water polo players — high school girls — became responsible for defending their own Title IX rights. Title Waves takes readers from the beaches where they had to practice to the meetings where they fought with administrators to the legal hearings where they established a landmark legal settlement. Along the way, Cross tells gripping stories of generations of other women who made similar personal sacrifices to battle for what the law should’ve already afforded them.
“In order for women to fight for their rights, they must first know what they are,” she writes. In 2025, the Trump administration declared June to be Title IX month. Honor Mink, Badis, and all the generations of courageous women who fought for their rights by reading Title Waves and learning what Title IX means to women across the U.S.
So long for now,
John Patrick Pullen
Founding Editor, Long Lead