The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened a Title IX investigation into Smith College this week, challenging the Massachusetts women’s college’s decade-long policy of admitting transgender women — the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration targeting gender identity policies at American schools.
The probe, announced May 4, centers on whether Smith’s admissions practices and its policies governing bathroom, locker room, dormitory access, and sports participation violate federal sex discrimination law. The department argues that Title IX’s single-sex exception — which permits colleges to maintain all-male or all-female student bodies — applies only to biological sex, not gender identity.
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” said Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for the department’s civil rights office. “Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law.”
Smith, a private liberal arts college founded in 1871 and one of the largest remaining women’s colleges in the country, has admitted trans women since 2015. The school’s website states that “any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women” are eligible to apply. A college spokesperson said Smith “is fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws” but declined to comment further on the investigation.
The complaint that triggered the federal probe was filed in June 2025 by Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group. Nicole Neily, the organization’s president, welcomed the investigation. “I believe very strongly in the importance of single-sex spaces, be it a boys camp or an all-women’s college,” she said. “And how Smith College has been addressing the issue of gender, to me, is very troubling.”
Civil rights attorneys representing LGBTQ interests have pushed back sharply. Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights called the investigation an “ominous” example of government overreach into private institutions. “If they 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. Nicholas Hite of Lambda Legal noted that the complaint originated outside the Smith community entirely, arguing that the students these policies serve “chose to go to these places specifically because of their inclusive policies.”
Critics also argue that the administration is turning civil rights law on its head. Minter described the use of Title IX in this context as its “misuse and weaponization” — a law designed, he said, to protect people from sex-based discrimination, including discrimination against transgender people.
Smith’s history with transgender admissions is closely watched. The college made national headlines in 2013 when it denied admission to trans woman Calliope Wong, an episode that sparked activism across women’s college campuses and ultimately pushed Smith to revise its policies two years later.
The investigation is part of a broader Trump administration effort to roll back transgender rights across education and public life — an agenda that has included banning trans people from the military, suing states over trans athlete participation, and issuing an executive order on his first day back in office redefining gender as biological sex determined at conception. The number of women’s colleges in the U.S. has already declined from more than 200 to just 30; how the administration’s pressure campaign ultimately reshapes the policies — and identities — of those that remain is an open question.
