All-Women’s College Breaking The Law By Admitting Trans-Identifying Men: Complaint

An education watchdog asked the Trump administration to crack down on one of the largest all-women’s colleges in the country because it admits transgender-identifying males and maintains restrooms. 

Defending Education filed a civil rights complaint on Friday alleging that Smith College’s admissions, discrimination, and restroom policies violate federal law. The complaint urges the department to investigate Smith College, located in Northampton, Massachusetts, for discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Title IX. 

The complaint also argues that the university policies defy President Donald Trump’s executive orders combating gender ideology and the Education Department’s guidance that Title IX does not include gender identity as a protected class. 

“Discrimination based on gender identity is not the same as discrimination based on sex under Title IX, as this Department well knows, and the Supreme Court has never held it is,” Defending Education Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry wrote in the complaint. “In other words, to the extent Smith’s accommodations for so-called gender identity encroach upon sex-specific programs and spaces, it is in violation of Title IX.”

The complaint also says that the school is violating federal policy by allowing males who identify as females to take the place of females in admissions. For the 2023-2024 school year, Smith only admitted around 20% of those who applied. 

Its policies make clear that the historically all-women’s college allows men to enter so long as they identify as transgender. 

“People who identify as women—cis, trans and nonbinary women—are eligible to apply to Smith,” the college explains. “Smith’s policy is one of self-identification. The applicant’s affirmation of identity is sufficient.”

The decision to admit males was first made in 2015 after Smith conducted a year-long study group on the topic. 

“Smith has students, faculty and staff who are trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming. Smith students are here to engage with each other socially and academically in respectful ways, and our community values the range of identities that the student body represents,” Smith says. 

The college says that it is expanding more of its facilities to allow men into women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. 

“Every single-occupancy restroom on campus is designated all-gender, and more and more multi-stall bathrooms are as well,” the college notes, adding that it has “an all-gender locker room in the athletic facilities, with private showering and changing areas.”

The complaint flagged other aspects of Smith’s embrace of gender ideology, including the Schacht Center for Health and Wellness’ commitment to providing “gender-affirming primary care, including hormone therapy, labs and specialty consultations and referrals for students interested in surgeries,” according to the college’s independent student newspaper. 

Defending Education would like to see the Education Department, which has pushed for schools to abandon gender ideology, address the “unlawful” policies at Smith. 

“At a minimum, then, Smith’s gender-identity-based Equal Opportunity Policy; its admissions policy, which accepts natal men in lieu of similarly situated female applicants; and its all-gender restroom and locker room policies, which divest female students of their privacy, safety, and equal educational opportunity, all appear to violate Title IX,” Perry wrote in the complaint.

In a statement shared with The Daily Wire, Perry added that it remains important to fight for girls and women 53 years after the passage of Title IX.

“On the anniversary of Title IX, it bears remembering that Title IX was passed after an extensive campaign from women’s rights activists and a federal court decision holding that high school girls were not entitled to the same athletic opportunities as boys. Yet today, some institutions of higher education, including those that hold themselves out to be single-sex, appear to adhere to the notion that sex is fungible — even something that arch feminist Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote was false.”

“Our organization is keenly interested in ensuring equality of educational opportunity for all students, and it is our hope that when assessing the ‘female-only’ policies of colleges like Smith, the Department of Education will take a closer look at that college’s possible attempts to rewrite Title IX, and allow transgender-identified males access to women’s-only spaces and admission slots,” Perry said. “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. Today and always, Title IX is worth celebrating, protecting, and enforcing so that men and women can truly be equal–and equally protected–in American education.”