From Staff and Wire Reports
The U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation earlier this month into Smith College, an all-women’s institution in Massachusetts, for admitting transgender women. The probe by the department’s Office of Civil Rights will look at whether the college violated Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding discrimination based on sex in education. The move is the latest by the Trump administration to limit transgender rights in the U.S.
But according to People’s World, which describes itself as “a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States,” Professor Carrie Bake with Smith College’s Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program argues that the Trump administration’s investigation is “premised upon a fundamental misreading of Title IX law.”
Noting that the DOE press release announcing the investigation “fails to make clear the nature of the alleged violation — likely because no violation actually occurred,” the People’s World report on Bake’s argument against the investigation points out that “Title IX does not include a single-sex exception, as Trump’s DOE claims.”
People’s World continues, “Title IX prohibits exclusionary discrimination on the basis of sex, but Trump’s DOE wages precisely the opposite complaint against Smith College: namely, that the school doesn’t discriminate on the basis of assigned sex in admissions. The allegation that Smith has thereby violated Title IX is patently incoherent.”
People’s World goes on to explain that “contrary to the language of the press release, there is no process by which private institutions of higher education ‘qualify’ as single-sex under Title IX. Public institutions that have ‘traditionally and continually’ admitted only a single sex from the time of their establishment are exempted from the anti-discrimination law [and] Title IX does not determine the conditions under which any institution, whether public or private, may identify itself as a women’s college or a men’s college. It merely permits the existence of sex-discriminatory admissions.”
Smith College, a private liberal arts school founded in 1871, has admitted trans women since 2015. The school’s admission policies drew attention in 2013 when a trans high school senior was denied acceptance because her gender identity did not match the one on her financial aid forms.
Its website now says that “any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women” are eligible to apply to the school. Advocates have supported the shift over the years, saying that women’s colleges were founded to educate those marginalized because of their gender.
According to the Department of Education in a news release, Title IX contains an exception that allows colleges to be all-male or all-female, but it only applies “on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity.”
But, according to the People’s Voice report, Bake argues that “Trump’s DOE is either misunderstanding or intentionally misrepresenting what the law actually says,” and that the law “states that institutions that receive federal funding may provide sex-segregated facilities — not that they must. The same is true of athletics, as federally funded institutions are permitted, but not required, to maintain single-sex athletic programs.
The investigation into Smith College stems from a complaint filed with the Office of Civil Rights in June 2025 by the conservative legal group Defending Education, which claims to “oppose, among other things, discrimination on the basis of sex” in schools.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.