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Dive Brief:
- The Trump administration on Monday opened a Title IX investigation into Smith College, a private women’s institution, over its policy of admitting transgender women.
- The Massachusetts college has considered applications from any prospective students who self-identify as women since 2015. That includes transgender and nonbinary students.
- The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, however, framed the long-standing policy — specifically Smith’s decision to allow transgender women “access to women-only spaces” — as a potential violation of Title IX. Smith confirmed on Tuesday that it had received notice of the department’s probe but said it “does not comment on pending government investigations.”
Dive Insight:
Title IX bars federally funded education programs, including colleges and universities, from discrimination “on the basis of sex.”
But the 1972 law does not cover undergraduate admissions decisions at private colleges, allowing them to admit students of only one sex, according to Andrew Nesenoff, an attorney specializing in Title IX and on-campus due process. However, programs and activities at those colleges must adhere to Title IX if they take federal funding.
The Education Department on Monday took aim at Smith’s admission policies, alleging they allow “biological males into women’s intimate spaces,” such as dormitories, bathrooms and locker rooms.
Under President Donald Trump, the Education Department has argued that Title IX not only protects the option for single-sex spaces — specifically women-only spaces — it also requires colleges and K-12 institutions to bar transgender women from being in those spaces.
One of Trump’s first acts in his second term was to order the federal government to only recognize two sexes: male and female. His executive order also dismissed the validity of gender identity that doesn’t align with one’s sex assigned at birth. The scientific and medical communities have pushed back against both positions.
Throughout its Monday statement, the Education Department referred to transgender women as “biological males.” GLAAD, a nonprofit focused on preventing discriminatory coverage of the LGBTQ+ community, has identified “biological male” in this context as a hate term.
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” Kimberly Richey, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement Monday. “Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law.”
A Smith spokesperson said Tuesday that the college “is fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws.”
The Education Department’s probe follows a June OCR complaint filed by the conservative advocacy group Defending Education. The organization — which bills itself as a grassroots movement but has extensive links to right-wing funding sources, think tanks and media — has filed numerous OCR complaints against colleges since its founding in 2021. Two such complaints have recently resulted in Education Department investigations into Stanford University and Missouri State University.
In May 2015, the Smith board of trustees voted to extend admissions consideration to transgender women following a yearlong institutional study, pressure from students and external campaigning by LGBTQ+ rights advocates.
At least four other women’s colleges at the time — Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Mills College and Simmons College — had already updated their admissions policies to include transgender women.
Kathleen McCartney, Smith’s then-president, said at the time that the decision “affirms Smith’s unwavering mission and identity as a women’s college.”
“In the years since Smith’s founding, concepts of female identity have evolved,” McCartney said. “Smith alumnae have been leaders in the movement to afford women greater freedoms of aspiration and self-expression. At the same time, educational settings in which women are central remain powerfully transformative.”
Smith does not accept cisgender or transgender men into its undergraduate programs, although people of any gender can enroll in its graduate school.
It is not clear what percentage of Smith’s student body identifies as nonbinary or transgender, as the college does not publish student demographics disaggregated by gender identity.
The Biden administration attempted to formally extend Title IX’s protections against sex-based discrimination to sexual orientation and gender identity through new regulations. But, days before former President Joe Biden left office, a federal judge struck down those regulations as unconstitutional.
The Biden administration had also been on track to introduce a Title IX rule prohibiting blanket bans on transgender students’ participation on sports teams aligned with their gender identities. But it ultimately withdrew the rule in the final weeks of Biden’s term.
