(LifeSiteNews) — On May 4, the U.S. Department of Education announced an investigation into one of America’s largest women’s colleges over its admission of trans-identifying men.
In a statement published Monday, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) stated that Smith College was “admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams. OCR will determine whether the college violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) by allowing biological males into women’s intimate spaces.”
According to the OCR:
Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies – but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity. An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.
When an institution holds itself out as being an all-women’s college, it is not just promising to deliver female-only dorms and bathrooms, and single-sex athletics; it is also committing to maintain a student body that makes possible a particular form of sorority and camaraderie.
The Guardian and other media outlets framed the investigation as “another escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people.” The Trump administration, however, is merely restoring the status quo that existed pre-2010 when the Obama Education Department announced that Title IX now offered protections for “sex stereotypes” and “gender nonconformity” rather than biological sex. In 2014, Obama expanded that to include trans-identifying students.
Title IX, which was enacted in 1972 and is enforced by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
As I reported previously, in 2017, the Trump administration promptly rescinded this new, expansive definition of Title IX; the Biden administration reversed the reversal and expanded it. Upon re-election, Donald Trump again rolled this change back in 2025. Whether Title IX applies to transgender claims has thus become a central issue in the culture war, especially as it applies to the privacy of female minors.
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” stated Kimberly Richey, the assistant secretary for civil rights. “Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law. The Trump administration will continue to uphold the law and fight to restore common sense.”
Smith College responded by stating that it is “fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws. The college does not comment on pending government investigations.” Smith College, which was founded in 1875 to establish a high level of education for women, began admitting trans-identifying men in 2015.
As Smith College leadership stated at the time, “The mission of Smith College is to educate women of promise for lives of distinction. In the years since Smith’s founding, concepts of female identity have evolved. Smith alumnae have been leaders in the movement to afford women greater freedoms of aspiration and self-expression.”
The media framing of the Trump administration’s attempt to return to the pre-2010 status quo as an “attack on trans people” is a microcosmic example of how the sexual revolutionaries radically change norms – in this case, by defining trans-identifying men as “transgender women – and then accuse those who seek a return to norms as the revolutionaries attempting to undermine norms. It is a spectacular and deliberate inversion of the truth.
