A conservative organization has filed a complaint with the Department of Education alleging that Smith College, supposedly an all-women’s school, is violating Title IX by admitting transgender students and maintaining a team to investigate “bias” incidents involving “gender identity.”
Founded in 1871, the Northampton, Massachusetts, school is one of the nation’s largest all-women’s colleges. It is also incredibly woke. Smith did away with requiring applicants to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in 2009 because of its alleged bias against minorities, instituted a trans-inclusive admissions policy in 2015, and has been accused of mandating discriminatory “diversity” training. In addition, writes Wikipedia:
Smith offers “panel discussions and seminars for lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students on subjects such as coming out as transgender at work.” In 2003, Smith students voted to remove pronouns from the language of the Student Government Association constitution, in order to make that document inclusive of transgender students who don’t identify with the pronouns “she” and “her.”
Defending Education (DE), a national nonprofit consisting of students and parents, is challenging Smith’s transgender-related policies. In a Friday letter to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, DE vice president Sarah Parshall Perry called on the department to “promptly investigate all the allegations in this complaint, act swiftly to remedy unlawful policies and practices, and order appropriate relief.”
Perry accused Smith of violating Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funding. According to the Daily Caller:
The law was manipulated under the Biden administration to include “gender identity” in a rewrite of the rule that was later shot down in the courts and eventually withdrawn by the administration.
The Trump administration has since made it clear that the federal government will only be adhering to the biological definition of sex.
Smith, however, continues to operate under the Biden-era rules. Perry notes that while the college claims to be following Title IX, it “interprets Title IX to prohibit ‘gender identity’ discrimination, despite federal case law and [the Education] Department’s guidance to the contrary.”
For example, Smith’s “Gender Identity & Expression” webpage states that “Smith is a women’s college,” but it goes on to explain that “people who identify as women — cis, trans and nonbinary women — are eligible to apply to Smith.” Furthermore, “Smith’s policy is one of self-identification. The applicant’s affirmation of identity is sufficient.”
In other words, a man who identifies as a woman can attend the allegedly all-women’s Smith. By contrast, an actual woman who identifies as a man cannot. Once admitted, a woman can “transition” to male, or a trans woman can revert to identifying as male, and still receive a degree.
Perry’s letter points out that Smith’s policies
indicate that “[e]very single-occupancy restroom on campus is designated all-gender, and more and more multi-stall bathrooms are as well.” The college also advertises “[a]n all-gender locker room in the athletic facilities,” and the college’s Health & Wellness Center “provides trans-affirming primary care, including hormone therapy.”
To ensure that it “maintain[s] an inclusive campus climate” — inclusive for those who agree with its policies, that is — Smith has a “Bias Response Team” that investigates
incidents … includ[ing] an act of bigotry, harassment or intimidation based on age, color, creed, disability, gender identity, gender expression, race, religion, nation/ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation or veteran status committed on campus for which the respondent cannot be identified.
This includes, but is not limited to, slurs, graffiti, written messages, or images that harass or intimidate individuals or groups because of their membership in the above listed protected classes. [Emphasis added.]
When the allegedly offending party can be identified, the school has other mechanisms for reporting the bias incident so that appropriate punishment can be meted out.
Citing Supreme Court cases, Perry argues:
In United States v. Virginia, the Supreme Court explained that sex discrimination — which includes policies, like Smith’s, that fail to respect sex-specific programs and spaces — is presumptively unlawful. Smith’s gender identity policies cannot possibly satisfy that standard because the entire purpose of Title IX is to “protec[t] biological women in education.” That purpose is directly undermined by policies that “subordinate the fears, concerns, and privacy interests of biological women to the desires of transgender biological men” who want to intrude upon spaces normally reserved for “their female peers.” Smith’s preference for gender identity over biological sex, in other words, “subvert[s] the original purpose of Title IX.”
Title IX, of course, should not even exist, because the federal government is not constitutionally empowered to fund education, much less dictate schools’ internal policies. But as long as it does exist and schools willingly accept money with such strings attached, the law’s actual words, not some trendy 21st-century redefinition of them, ought to be applied. That is especially true when both the judicial and executive branches have rejected the redefinition and Congress has not changed the law.
Perry told the Daily Caller:
Today, some institutions of higher education, including those that hold themselves out to be single-sex, appear to adhere to the notion that sex is fungible. Our organization is keenly interested in ensuring equality of educational opportunity for all students, and it is our hope that when assessing the “female-only” policies of colleges like Smith, the Department of Education will take a closer look at that college’s possible attempts to rewrite Title IX, and allow transgender-identified males access to women’s-only spaces and admission slots.