Trump administration investigates Smith College transgender policy For more than a decade, Smith College, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious all-women schools, has admitted self-identified transgender women without significant public backlash. However, the election of President Trump to a second term shifted the focus of the college’s admissions policy under a federal government scrutinizing diversity practices in higher education. On Monday, the federal government announced it had initiated a civil rights investigation of Smith College, alleging its admission of transgender women violates Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. The investigation began in 2025 when Smith awarded an honorary degree to Admiral Rachel L. Levine, a transgender woman and former Biden administration official, and invited her to speak at the school’s commencement ceremony. This decision drew attention from Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of the conservative watchdog group Defending Education, who filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education in June 2025. The complaint argued that Smith’s policy discriminates against “biological women” by admitting students whose assigned sex at birth was male but identify as female, while barring students whose assigned sex at birth was female but identify as male. The Department of Education’s Civil Rights office stated that Title IX allows single-sex colleges to maintain all-female student bodies based on biological sex, not gender identity. The statement emphasized that an all-girls college admitting male-identifying students would no longer qualify as single-sex under the law.#trump_administration #title_ix #smith_college #sarah_parrish_perry #defending_education
