The Trump administration introduced Monday that it has decided the College of Pennsylvania violated federal civil rights legal guidelines by permitting transgender athletes to compete in ladies’s sports activities.
The Ivy League college flouted Title IX guidelines by “denying women equal opportunities” and permitting transgender athletes to “occupy women-only intimate facilities,” the administration mentioned – giving UPenn 10 days to “voluntarily resolve these violations or risk a referral to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for enforcement proceedings.”
“Little girls who look up to Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan can find hope in today’s action – the Trump Administration will not allow male athletes to invade female private spaces or compete in female categories,” Craig Trainor, the Schooling Division’s performing assistant secretary for civil rights, mentioned in an announcement.
“UPenn has a choice to make: do the right thing for its female students and come into full compliance with Title IX immediately or continue to advance an extremist political project that violates federal antidiscrimination law and puts UPenn’s federal funding at risk,” he added.
The Schooling Division’s proposed decision settlement requires UPenn to launch an announcement vowing to adjust to Title IX in all of its athletic packages; restore athletic information, titles and awards which were “misappropriated by male athletes competing in female categories”; and apologize to the feminine athletes whose particular person recognitions are to be restored.
UPenn didn’t reply to The Put up’s request for remark.
Title IX prohibits discrimination on the premise of intercourse in any schooling program or exercise receiving federal monetary help.
In March, the Trump administration froze $175 million in taxpayer funding to UPenn after the varsity defied President Trump’s govt order banning transgender ladies athletes of all ages from competing on women and girls’s sports activities groups.
A UPenn spokesperson informed The Put up on the time that the varsity was “in full compliance” with “NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams.”
The elite college grew to become the middle of the controversy over transgender athlete participation after considered one of its male swimmers transitioned and joined the ladies’s workforce earlier than occurring to win an NCAA Division I title.
Trans swimmer Lia Thomas received the ladies’s 500-yard freestyle after transitioning earlier than the 2022 season.
Thomas additionally went on to tie for fifth place in opposition to College of Kentucky feminine swimmer Riley Gaines, who has since grow to be an outspoken opponent of trans athlete inclusion in ladies’s sports activities, and was referenced in Trainor’s assertion Monday.
Former UPenn feminine swimmers Grace Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holmquist filed a federal lawsuit in opposition to their alma mater earlier this yr over being compelled to compete with Thomas.
Earlier this month, the DOJ sued Maine’s Division of Schooling over claims that the state violated Title IX by “failing to protect women in women’s sports.”
“The Department of Justice will not sit by when women are discriminated against in sports,” Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi mentioned on the time. “This is about sports, this is also about these young women’s personal safety.”
