The Student Resource Building, University of California Santa Barbara
The Payrolls Fight Back
What Linda McMahon’s Title IX changes reveal about the economy built around gender policy
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
October 4, 2026
Something interesting is happening at the Department of Education.
On September 28, Education Secretary Linda McMahon formally repealed the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulations and restored the 2020 regulatory framework. Federal courts had already vacated the Biden rule, so McMahon was partly bringing the Code of Federal Regulations into line with what her department had been enforcing since early 2025.
But the more interesting story may not be the regulation itself.
It may be everything that grew around it.
Title IX began with a remarkably straightforward proposition: no person, on the basis of sex, could be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under a federally funded education program.
Over the decades, that simple prohibition accumulated an increasingly elaborate administrative structure. Sex discrimination came to include sexual harassment. Sexual harassment required procedures, investigators, training, coordinators, hearings, appeals and lawyers. The Biden administration’s 2024 rule went further by explicitly incorporating sexual orientation and gender identity into its interpretation of sex discrimination.
A few words in a federal regulation can create a remarkable amount of activity.
🅱️ BOB: Whenever Washington adds twelve pages explaining what three words really mean, somebody is going to need a lawyer.
That is where this story gets interesting.
Regulation Creates Transactions
Tell a school that gender identity falls within its Title IX responsibilities and practical questions immediately follow. Which restroom or locker room may a student use? Which athletic team? What happens when another student objects? Can an employee decline to use requested pronouns? Does that become harassment? What accommodations are required? What happens when state law and federal policy point in different directions?
Every question requires a decision, and every decision carries potential liability.
Institutions respond predictably. They write policies, conduct training, hire specialists, retain lawyers, document conversations and establish procedures for handling complaints. None of this requires corruption or bad faith.
It requires complexity.
Complexity creates intermediaries. Ambiguity creates billable hours.
And higher education was already building an enormous professional infrastructure capable of absorbing those new responsibilities.
Between 1976 and 2018, U.S. college enrollment increased about 78 percent and full-time faculty increased 92 percent. Full-time administrators increased 164 percent.
But the really striking number is the growth of full-time employees classified as other professionals: 452 percent.
That does not mean universities spent four decades hiring nothing but Title IX officers. They didn’t. Modern universities run computer networks, financial-aid systems, research programs, disability services, admissions operations and many other functions that require professional employees.
But that is precisely the point.
The great expansion was not mainly presidents, provosts and deans. Delta Cost Project research found that executive and managerial positions remained a relatively small share of public-college employment. Much of the growth occurred farther down the professional hierarchy—in the growing body of specialists who administer the modern university.
I saw the change myself at UC Santa Barbara. When I returned years after attending there, I found an entire brand-new building housing programs and departments that simply had not existed when I was a student. There were new identity-based fields, new specialties and a remarkable amount of material devoted to subjects such as diaspora and group identity.
Whatever mixture of academic fashion, politics and regulatory requirements produced it, the important point was hard to miss: an entirely new institutional structure had appeared. It had offices, employees, budgets and careers attached to it.
That is what abstract policy eventually looks like when it lands on a university campus.
It gets a building.
By 2012, the average number of faculty and ordinary staff for each administrator had fallen roughly 40 percent since 1990 at most types of four-year institutions. Professional administrative positions were growing particularly rapidly.
That matters because every time Washington adds another institutional obligation, somebody has to administer it. A professor cannot simply handle a complicated Title IX complaint between his ten o’clock lecture and lunch. Somebody writes the policy, receives the complaint, investigates it, documents the process, trains the employees and makes sure the university followed federal requirements.
Then somebody calls the lawyer.
The Legal Economy
Once a new category of behavior becomes potentially actionable, disagreements inevitably follow.
One lawyer represents the student making the complaint. Another may represent the accused. Another represents the institution. Advocacy organizations enter cases because precedent matters. State attorneys general sue federal agencies, federal lawyers defend regulations, judges issue injunctions and appellate courts reconsider them.
The Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulation was challenged in ten separate lawsuits. Eight courts issued preliminary injunctions affecting 26 states and particular schools elsewhere before courts ultimately vacated the regulation.
That represents a remarkable amount of legal activity surrounding the interpretation of a comparatively short statute.
It does not prove that lawyers on either side are insincere. Most presumably believe in the positions they represent.
It demonstrates something simpler.
There is now an economy surrounding the disagreement.
🅱️ BOB: I don’t know who’s right yet. But I can already tell who’s charging by the hour.
McMahon has begun changing that economy at the margins. Her department has rescinded gender-identity-related requirements contained in earlier OCR settlement agreements, while the restoration of the 2020 rule reduces the range of conduct treated federally under the broader Biden interpretation.
Change the definition and you change what schools must do.
Some investigations may never occur. Some policies may no longer be required. Some training becomes unnecessary. Some disputes never become federal Title IX cases at all.
The lawyers will not disappear. Changing the boundary itself produces litigation, sometimes a great deal of it. But there is an important difference between a temporary legal battle over where the boundary should be and a permanent compliance apparatus devoted to administering everything inside the boundary.
McMahon is moving the boundary.
That threatens more than an interpretation. It potentially reduces some of the activity built around it.
And Then There Is the Media
Lawyers are only part of the ecosystem.
Consider the ingredients of a transgender Title IX case: sex, sports, children or young adults, civil rights, parents, fairness, government authority, protests, politicians, judges, winners and losers.
It is nearly perfect material for modern media.
A complaint produces a story. The investigation produces another. Then comes the ruling, the reaction, the injunction, the appeal and the politician saying something provocative about all of it.
The incentives work on both sides. A conservative publication can attract an audience by presenting the dispute as gender ideology overwhelming common sense. A progressive publication can cover the same event as an attack on transgender rights.
Both may sincerely believe their framing.
Both may also get excellent traffic.
The lawyers monetize the dispute. The media monetizes the drama.
🅱️ BOB: There’s nothing television likes better than a problem that can be solved right after the commercial and somehow never is.
This does not require journalists to manufacture controversies. A regulatory system capable of continually generating genuine conflicts supplies the stories automatically.
And unlike a lawyer hired to resolve a particular case, a media organization gains little economic advantage from the argument disappearing forever.
Tomorrow needs another story.
Oppressor and Oppressed
There is one final component.
Much contemporary political thinking interprets social disputes through relationships between dominant and marginalized groups. Applied to gender identity, transgender students become a vulnerable minority while traditional institutions and majority norms are understood to possess greater social power.
Whether one accepts that framework completely, partially or not at all, it changes the significance assigned to ordinary disputes.
A disagreement about a locker room is no longer merely about a locker room. An athletic roster can become a civil-rights question. A dispute over pronouns can become a question of institutional discrimination.
Once the disagreement acquires that larger meaning, it becomes harder to resolve locally. The bureaucracy becomes involved because discrimination has been alleged. Lawyers become involved because rights are at stake. Advocacy groups become involved because precedent matters. Politicians become involved because constituents care. Media become involved because there is conflict.
And everybody can sincerely believe he is simply doing his job.
That is the fascinating part.
It doesn’t require a conspiracy.
Nobody needs to arrange a secret meeting or decide collectively to keep the controversy alive. Each institution follows the incentives immediately in front of it. The regulator regulates. The compliance office complies. The advocate advocates. The lawyer litigates. The politician campaigns. The journalist covers the fight.
Eventually an idea becomes an institution.
And institutions acquire payrolls.
McMahon’s Experiment
This is why Linda McMahon’s Title IX changes deserve more attention than another round of arguments about women’s sports.
They give us something close to a natural experiment.
For decades, higher education has accumulated a vast professional administrative structure. During part of that period, Title IX itself expanded from a straightforward prohibition on sex discrimination into a much more elaborate regulatory system. Gender identity then enlarged the number of potentially regulated disputes again.
Now Washington is pulling part of that definition backward.
We can watch what happens.
Do certain kinds of complaints decline? Do schools eliminate some procedures? Does the demand for particular training and consulting services contract? After the initial legal battles over the new boundaries, does litigation decrease?
Or does the activity simply move elsewhere?
Those are empirical questions. We do not have to guess at anybody’s hidden motives.
Maybe almost everyone involved believes exactly what he says he believes.
That does not change the incentive structure.
🅱️ BOB: Never blame a conspiracy for something a paycheck can explain all by itself.
Political disputes are usually presented as contests over principles—rights, equality, fairness, safety and identity. Those arguments are real.
But public policy does something else while everyone is arguing about principle.
It creates obligations. Obligations create jobs. Jobs become careers. Careers create institutions. Institutions acquire constituencies.
And constituencies are considerably harder to eliminate than the regulation that helped create them.
Linda McMahon can change the words in the Code of Federal Regulations.
Changing everything that learned to live around those words may prove considerably harder.
Ideas can change quickly. Institutions cannot.
And payrolls fight back.
Bonus Section: The Author’s Cut
This part is for those curious about how I wrote this article.
If you aren’t interested in this type of analysis, then thanks for reading and please move on with your day.
How I Built This Essay
A few readers may be interested in why this piece is written the way it is.
The first decision was to avoid writing another article about a single Title IX dispute.
Those stories already exist by the hundreds. Another one would have added very little.
I wanted to move above the individual controversies and look at the machinery producing them.
That is why the essay begins with Linda McMahon but does not stay with Linda McMahon. She provides the opening event and, later, the test case. The real subject is the institutional structure surrounding the rule.
Start Small, Then Widen
The opening is deliberately narrow.
A regulation changes.
Then the lens widens.
First comes the school. Then the administrator. Then the lawyer. Then the media. Finally the larger ideological framework.
That sequence is intentional.
If I had announced the whole theory in the first five paragraphs, the reader would have had to decide immediately whether he agreed with me.
I would rather let the argument accumulate.
Each section adds one more piece until the shape becomes visible.
Make the Abstract Physical
The administrative-growth statistics are important, but statistics alone can remain oddly weightless.
That is why the UCSB building is in there.
I had seen the change myself.
A three-story, 63,000-square-foot building gives the reader something a percentage cannot. You can picture it. It has doors, offices, employees and a budget.
That is also why the line “It gets a building” is so short.
The paragraph before it does the explaining.
The short line does the landing.
And I had high confidence it would land because I had seen the thing with my own eyes. I did not have to invent the image. I only had to describe what I saw.
Do Not Claim More Than I Can Prove
This essay could easily have become an accusation about motive.
I avoided that on purpose.
I do not know why every administrator, lawyer, activist or reporter does what he does. More important, I do not need to know.
The argument works without mind-reading.
I am interested in incentives and institutional behavior, not secret meetings.
That makes the case both stronger and harder to dismiss.
Let the Reader Do Some Work
I also resisted saying the quiet part out loud.
I could have written a much louder essay about people making money from controversy.
That would have been easier.
It also would have been weaker.
Instead, I show the staffing growth, the legal activity, the media incentives and the institutional permanence. Then I let the reader connect them.
I generally prefer that kind of persuasion.
If the reader reaches the conclusion himself, I do not have to drag him there.
Use Humor to Release Pressure
Bob appears four times for a reason.
First of all, it’s in his contract.
Just kidding.
The subject is bureaucratic, legal and ideological. Left alone, that can become heavy very quickly.
Bob breaks the pressure without changing the argument.
His lines are not separate jokes pasted onto the article. Each one arrives where the reader may be ready for a little oxygen.
That is the job.
That’s what he signed up for.
Save the Largest Claim for the End
The title tells you where the essay is going, but the piece does not fully explain it until late.
“Payrolls” starts as a metaphor.
By the end, it is not really a metaphor anymore.
That progression is deliberate.
The final paragraphs are supposed to make the reader reinterpret everything that came before them: the staffing, the offices, the legal work, the media activity and the institutional resistance.
The ending works only if the rest of the essay has earned it.
That is why I did not begin with the conclusion.
I built toward it.
What I Was Trying to Do
Mostly, I was trying to make the reader see a system rather than a series of unrelated controversies.
Not tell him what to think about every case.
Not assign motives to everyone involved.
Not turn the essay into another shouting match over gender policy.
Just show the causal relationships clearly enough that the machinery becomes visible.
Once that happens, the reader can decide what he thinks about it.
That is usually where I want to leave him.
