President Biden wanted a Title IX revamp to be a part of his legacy, but the courts keep getting in his way.

A federal court in Missouri ruled Wednesday that schools in Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota don’t have to comply with the administration’s new Title IX rules while their challenge makes its way through the court. The ruling comes just one week before the administration’s August 1 Title IX implementation deadline ahead of the new school year.

The Missouri ruling is just the latest red state court challenge to notch a victory. There are now 20 states in which the courts have issued temporary stays on implementing the administration’s new Title IX rules. Another case involving Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina is pending.

Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding. The law’s detailed rules, which are enacted by bureaucrats in the Department of Education’s unelected Office of Civil Rights and keep changing based on the political party in power, govern school athletics and how K-12 public schools and most colleges handle sexual harassment and misconduct complaints.

Mr. Biden campaigned in 2020 on rolling back the Trump administration’s Title IX rules, saying they made it harder for victims of sexual assault to come forward. In April, the Biden administration released its final Title IX rules, which didn’t just revamp school sexual misconduct procedures but rewrote Title IX to expand the law’s protections for women to also include protections for transgender and otherwise LGBTQ-identifying individuals.

Conspicuously absent from the Biden administration’s finalized rules were those regarding school athletics. The administration said in April that these rules were merely delayed, but the proposed version would have allowed gender identity to dictate sports team participation in most cases — a politically unpopular position with the American public.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans think sports team participation should be decided by biological sex, according to Gallup, and that number has only increased in recent years.

In response to the administration’s April release, several Republican governors instructed their schools not to comply with the Biden administration’s Title IX rules, and 26 GOP-led states sued the administration. Critics say the Biden changes undermine the intent of Title IX and hurt women.

These critics, which include conservative groups like Moms for Liberty and women’s rights groups, say rules requiring schools to treat transgender women as biological women — or risk losing federal funding — will force schools to allow transgender women in women’s dressing rooms and bathrooms and to compete for women’s scholarships and other sex-specific awards.

“It’s so much bigger than sports,” a former University of Pennsylvania swimmer, Paula Scanlan, who now works with the Independent Women’s Forum, tells the Sun.

Ms. Scanlan was a college teammate of a transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, who beat NCAA women’s records, dominated the sport, and at 6-foot-4-inches tall became a symbol of transgender women’s physical advantages against women. “This is about opportunities women fought so hard for when Title IX was passed 52 years ago,” Ms. Scanlan says.

The courts so far agree. “There are two sexes: male and female,” a June court ruling in a Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia case said, adding that Title IX’s implementation should be delayed because “the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their claims.”

In a red state challenge in which Moms for Liberty and two other conservative groups are among the plaintiffs, a Kansas court ruled this month that a temporary injunction on enforcing Title IX extends to all schools in which Moms for Liberty members’ children are students. The conservative parental rights group boasts more than 130,000 members in 48 states. That means potentially hundreds of additional schools outside these red states will also be exempt.

Moms for Liberty is trying to maximize that number. On Tuesday, the group launched a “landmark opt-in process” to allow parents to add their children’s schools to a list of schools nationwide that will be included in the court’s stay. “This is a huge win for parents across the country and for America because this ruling protects and affirms our First Amendment Rights,” the group’s co-founders, Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, said in a statement.

The Biden administration is not sitting idly by while these challenges to Mr. Biden’s legacy make their way through the courts. The Department of Justice on Monday asked the Supreme Court to take emergency action to force 10 of these GOP-led states to implement the portions of Title IX not related to gender identity and sexual orientation.

Now that Mr. Biden has dropped his re-election bid, will Vice President Harris stake her own position on Title IX and transgender participation in women’s athletics? Most major LGBTQ rights organizations endorsed her this week. Trump made his opposition to transgender participation in women’s sports clear at the Republican National Convention, to great applause.