Minnesota's Trans Athletes Suit Mostly Dismissed — But a $2.9 Billion Question Survives

A federal judge in Minneapolis handed the Trump administration a win this week — but not a clean one.

In a 44-page order issued late Monday, Chief U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud largely dismissed Minnesota’s lawsuit challenging the administration’s interpretation of Title IX as it applies to transgender student athletes. The state had sued in April 2025 to block enforcement of Trump’s executive orders declaring that federal policy recognizes only two sexes and directing agencies to bar transgender women and girls from women’s and girls’ sports. Minnesota argued the government’s position conflicted with its own state law, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.

Tostrud, a Trump appointee, found that most of what Minnesota was challenging wasn’t yet challengeable. The Department of Education’s findings that Minnesota’s policies violate Title IX, and the letters that followed, didn’t amount to “final agency action” under the Administrative Procedure Act — meaning there’s no formal, enforceable penalty on the table yet, just an agency stating its legal opinion. “The agencies’ statement of their position regarding Title IX’s correct interpretation does not force Minnesota to choose between incurring penalties of any kind or engaging in what it believes is lawful conduct,” Tostrud wrote. He dismissed Minnesota’s separate overreach claim on similar grounds, noting that a genuine legal dispute exists nationwide over how Title IX applies to trans athletes, so the administration can’t be said to have acted unlawfully by taking one side of an unsettled argument.

The claim that didn’t die

One piece of Minnesota’s case survived, and it may end up mattering more than everything else combined. Tostrud allowed the state’s spending clause claim to move forward — the argument that the federal government cannot impose newly invented conditions on federal funding without having given states clear notice of those conditions before they accepted the money.

At stake: roughly $2.9 billion in federal education funding the Trump administration could try to use as leverage to force Minnesota to change how it handles transgender students in school sports and facilities. Tostrud’s language here was notably careful. “It may be that Title IX does in fact prohibit transgender women and girls from participating on sports teams designated for women and girls or from using restrooms or locker rooms consistent with their gender identity,” he wrote. “But that does not mean Minnesota had sufficiently clear notice that Title IX contained that prohibition when it decided to accept federal funding.” In other words, the judge isn’t ruling on whether the administration’s reading of Title IX is correct — he’s ruling that if the government wants to enforce a new interpretation, it can’t retroactively spring it on a state that took the money under a different understanding of the rules.

That distinction is the whole ballgame going forward. This dispute — over notice, funding conditions and the limits of what Washington can compel a state to do through its checkbook — is now the live legal question, separate from the broader argument over what Title IX actually requires.

What happens next

The dismissal is without prejudice, meaning Minnesota can refile its other claims if and when the government does take a formal enforcement action — something Tostrud suggested is likely to happen eventually, since the Department of Education has already sued the Minnesota State High School League and the state directly over the same underlying dispute. He noted that lawsuit undercuts the government’s own argument that Minnesota’s case wasn’t ready for a court to hear. “It is difficult to understand how that case might be ripe, but this one is not,” he wrote.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison framed the surviving claim as the one that counts. “I’m pleased that a major constitutional claim against President Trump will move forward, and I look forward to proving in court that the president violated the Constitution,” he told Courthouse News. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

For Minnesota’s roughly 800 transgender student athletes, nothing changes immediately — the state’s policy allowing them to compete consistent with their gender identity remains in place while the litigation continues. But the ruling is a reminder of how this fight is actually being won and lost in 2026: less through sweeping declarations about what Title IX means, and more through narrower, procedural questions about federal power, funding strings and how much warning a state is owed before Washington changes the rules it’s playing by.

Sources: Courthouse News Service; The Epoch Times.