Department of Education opens investigation into Smith College for admitting trans women

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — In the Trump administration’s latest move to limit trans rights, the Department of Education has launched a Title IX investigation into Smith College, an all-women’s college in western Massachusetts, for admitting trans women.

Like most other women’s colleges in the US, Smith, a small liberal arts college, admits trans women. The 155-year-old school says it “is a women’s college and considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women are eligible to apply to Smith.”

In a Monday statement, the Department of Education said it was investigating Smith for “admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams.”

The term “biological men,” though often used by opponents of trans rights to describe trans women, is not commonly used by trans people.

Smith College told CNN it “is fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws” and “does not comment on pending government investigations.”

The Education Department says it’s investigating whether the college’s policy violates Title IX, a landmark federal civil rights law that bans sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives federal funding.

“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,” reads the statement. “An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”

Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the investigation an “ominous” example of government overreach into private institutions.

“If they (women’s colleges) have chosen – as many of them have – to admit transgender students, that’s something they should be able to do freely without being worried about persecution by the federal government,” he said.

“This administration seems hellbent on eliminating any inclusion of transgender people anywhere in our society,” he added.

President Donald Trump has taken sweeping measures to limit trans people’s rights and to deny trans identity exists in the first place. New policies under his second term include banning trans people from the military, suing states for allowing trans athletes to play on high school sports teams, restricting trans and nonbinary children’s access to gender-affirming care, and a Day 1 executive order that redefined gender as “sex” and said that humans are either male or female, determined by biology at conception.

Trans people make up a tiny fragment of the country’s population. Just 1% of the United States population ages 13 and older identify as trans, according to the Williams Institute, a public policy research center at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law focused on sexual orientation and gender identity.

It’s unclear how many trans students are at Smith today. The college adapted its admissions policies in 2015 to clearly include trans students, after Smith denied admission to trans woman Calliope Wong in 2013, triggering a wave of on-campus activism at women’s colleges. Although Smith’s admissions policy doesn’t explicitly include trans men, the college does provide support to trans male students.

Smith College says it “is actively working to expand support for transgender students” and provides resources including “trans-affirming” healthcare and peer support. The college also says that there are single-occupancy, all-gender restrooms and an all-gender locker room with private changing and showering areas on campus.

The investigation was opened in response to a civil rights complaint filed by Defending Education, a conservative nonprofit with the stated mission of protecting schools from “activists imposing harmful agendas.”

Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ rights, said it was notable the complaint didn’t originate with anyone at Smith College.

“The communities that these policies and that these institutions serve, they’re really happy they chose to go to these places,” Hite said. “Oftentimes, they chose to go to these places specifically because of their inclusive policies.”

He added that he saw admitting trans women as a natural extension of women’s colleges’ missions. “Women’s colleges came into existence because of oppression that was inflicted on the basis of gender,” he said. “It seems very much to me that inclusion of trans women is a perfectly logical next step in keeping with the goal of creating an educational opportunity for people who are being oppressed on the basis of gender.”

Minter, who has worked on several lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies, said that the use of Title IX reflects the “misuse and weaponization of anti-discrimination laws to do the very opposite of the thing those laws were enacted for.”

Title IX, he said, was meant to “protect people against all forms of sex-based discrimination, including discrimination against transgender people.”

The text of Title IX itself is brief and doesn’t attempt to define gender or sex. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, Title IX was taken to include protections for trans students. But Trump, in both his presidential terms, has reversed those protections.

Minter said that the investigation into Smith College would likely cause fear and anxiety for trans students and youth.

The administration is “seeking to destroy every single safe place for transgender young people in this country,” he said.

“It’s a vicious vendetta against a small vulnerable group of kids,” he said. “And it is long past time for anyone who cares about how these young people and their families must be feeling to really stand up to this.”

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CNN’s Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.