Did This Women’s College Violate Title IX by Admitting Men? Department of Education Is Investigating

The Department of Education opened an investigation into Smith College, probing whether the women’s college discriminated on the basis of sex by admitting men who claim to identify as transgender women.

“Smith College, while still portraying itself as a women’s-only institution, admits natal men who feel like women, and on nothing more than their say-so,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, told The Daily Signal in a Tuesday statement on the investigation. “That renders the gains of second-wave feminists who fought for Title IX mere relics of ancient history.”

“Title IX was a historic achievement for women’s equality in education, but Smith College seems to have forgotten that,” added Perry, who filed the complaint that led the department to open the probe.

“The college’s linguistic gymnastics are jaw-dropping, and as a recipient of federal funding, it must follow federal law—state law to the contrary notwithstanding,” she added. “We look forward to the Department of Education’s resolution of the claims against Smith.”

The Transgender Policy Investigation

Defending Education, a nonprofit watchdog, filed the complaint with the department’s Office for Civil Rights last June, claiming that Smith College “discriminates against women on the basis of sex by admitting males who identify as women (‘self-identified transgender women‘) and by permitting male students to use intimate facilities designated for women.”

“OCR is opening the complaint for investigation,” Alexander Artz, team leader at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, wrote in a Monday letter to Perry.

The Office for Civil Rights noted that it has not made a determination on the matter and remains a neutral factfinder in the investigation.

“Smith College has received notice that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened a Title IX investigation into the college,” a college spokeswoman told The Daily Signal on Tuesday. “The college is fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws. The college does not comment on pending government investigations.”

If the department finds that Smith College violated Title IX, it will lose federal funding until it comes back into compliance.

A Sea Change on Transgender Issues

While President Joe Biden’s administration had redefined “sex” to claim that schools needed to adopt transgender policies under Title IX, President Donald Trump reversed that on his first day in office last year.

Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to uphold the biological distinction between men and women, regardless of transgender identity claims. His order condemned as “wrong” the way that “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.”

His order stated that “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.”

While not everyone who identifies as transgender may pose a threat, critics have long noted that men may gain an unfair advantage in sports by identifying as women, that unscrupulous men may abuse transgender ideology to prey on women in women’s spaces, and that male sex offenders have reportedly sexually assaulted women in women’s prisons.

The Office for Civil Rights opened 18 investigations in January, probing educational entities for potentially violating Title IX by allowing men who identify as transgender to compete in women’s sports. That same month, the department found San José State University in violation of Title IX by allowing males to compete in women’s sports.