One of the nation’s best-known women’s colleges is under a federal civil-rights investigation for admitting transgender students and allowing them access to female dormitories, restrooms, locker rooms and athletic teams.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is reviewing whether Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, is violating Title IX by “allowing biological males into women’s intimate spaces.”
Founded in 1875 as an all-women’s institution, Smith announced in 2015 that it would begin accepting students who self-identify as female regardless of their biological sex.
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey in a Monday statement. “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.”
Last year, Defending Education filed a complaint with the department alleging that Smith has violated Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding.
“At the same time, Title IX also protects single-sex spaces: for example, female students are entitled to sex-segregated intimate spaces, single-sex membership in sororities, single-sex athletic teams, and single-sex admissions where an institution has held itself out to be single-sex and provides substantially equivalent educational opportunities,” said the conservative group in a statement last June.
Smith’s admissions policy on “Gender Identity and Expression” includes the following provision: “People who identify as women — cis, trans and nonbinary women — are eligible to apply to Smith,” according to the complaint.
“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 department said.
Title IX contains numerous exceptions for single-sex organizations, including private men’s and women’s colleges, but the department said such exemptions are based on biological sex, 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,” said the department in its statement.
While Smith admits transgender women as students, it doesn’t allow transgender men as students in what “appears to be yet another exercise in sex discrimination,” Defending Education said.
The Washington Times has reached out to Smith College for comment.
Sarah Parshall Perry, Defending Education vice president and senior legal fellow, said Monday that Smith’s transgender policy “makes a mockery of the ‘all-women’ institution.”
“Smith has a longstanding reputation as a women’s college of exclusive excellence. But that hasn’t prevented it from falling victim to the fiction of ‘transgender’ womanhood,” Ms. Perry said in a statement. “Admitting men who feel like women means that the institution — formerly one of the nation’s prestigious ‘Seven Sisters’ all-women’s colleges — is no longer for women only.”
Smith isn’t alone. Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, became the first of the “Seven Sisters” to accept transgender students, in 2014. Similar policies have since been adopted by Bryn Mawr and Wellesley.
The seven private women’s colleges were founded as counterparts to the Ivy League universities. All Ivy League institutions are now coed.
