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| trans colored heart on a sidewalk at Smith College photo by Kate Hobbs |
considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women are eligible to apply to Smith.
As it happens, Title IX very specifically includes an exception for admission. The Trump Administration in their press release says "the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity," continuing their intentional lack of understanding of how much works, which is also evidence by this from the press release:
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.
“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey. “
If I may snark for a moment: Ms. Richey attended Southern Nazarene University, which is not such an institution, so I haven't an idea how she would know.
What the Trump administration is doing is focusing on campus life on locker rooms and bathrooms (as has been noted: they really spend a lot of time thinking about bathrooms), saying the college is being investigated for “allowing biological males into women’s intimate spaces.”
Now, first, as a alum, I had to laugh, because an all-women's institution that has boyfriends, brothers, fathers, and male visitors inevitably end up with "biological males [in] women's intimate spaces." You're only a bit surprised the first time you run into someone's dad (inevitably a bit abashed) coming out of your house's bathroom. And Smith is part of the Five College system, allowing students from Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire, and UMass Amherst to take classes, so anyone under the impression that this is a cloistered community really doesn't know what they're talking about.
That isn't, of course, what they're going for here. The Trump administration specifically is attacking trans women, as they have done literally since the day they took office. Rather than the Office of Civil Rights working to enforce equal access in school districts and college and universities, it is now weaponized to end protections for Black and brown students, attack protections for trans students, and rarely if ever protect disabled students at all. As the New York Times wrote last month:
On Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, published a report that found that in 2025, the civil rights office negotiated the fewest anti-discrimination settlements with schools since the Education Department began posting the deals online in 2014.
These legally binding deals, known as resolution agreements, are typically the final product of extensive investigations, outlining clear steps for schools to remedy civil rights violations and avoid potential cuts to federal funding.
Mr. Trump’s administration secured 112 of these agreements in 2025, compared with an average of 818 per year during his first term, according to the report.
At the start of 2025, 12,000 cases were pending in the civil rights office, meaning the administration’s 112 resolution agreements last year provided enforceable relief to students in less than 1 percent of investigations, the report found. In 15 states, no resolution agreements were reached last year.
At the same time:
The decline in resolutions comes as President Trump has prevailed in rapidly revamping federal investigative targets to align with his political priorities. Those goals include pursuing allegations of anti-white discrimination in schools and stamping out existing protections for transgender students.
All of this is coming from an office that is a shell of what it once was: seven of the 12 regional offices have been closed, and the budget proposed by the administration "would cut civil rights staff by 49 percent, from 530 workers to 271, part of an overall 35 percent cut to civil rights office funding." Thus the extreme small amount of what the office is doing is pursing these investigations that persecute trans students, rather than doing anything about protecting civil rights.
That, in turn, has led some who have kept their jobs to leave, per this week's Politico:
“After my RIF, I saw some things that were coming out of OCR that I think are not lawful and I would not be comfortable doing,” said Beth Gellman-Beer, former Philadelphia regional OCR office director, who had worked at the agency since the George W. Bush administration. “I figured if I go back, I'll probably be asked to do something that I'm not going to be able to sign, and I'll get eliminated anyway.”
Gellman-Beer said she received three or four RIF notices and ongoing lawsuits over the fate of the agency felt like a rollercoaster and “back and forth whiplash.”
She returned to her job for two weeks, but ultimately resigned.
“I don't begrudge anyone who decided to go back, but I was physically ill those two weeks,” she said. “I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I was really having health issues. … I felt like it was going back into an abusive relationship after what I had been through.”
And again, that means less of the work of the office is getting done:
The strain the staffing cuts have left is evident: the office reached zero resolution agreements involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment or discriminatory school discipline in 2025, according to a report from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ staff. And it reached 91 percent fewer resolution agreements in 2025 than in 2017, the first year of the first Trump administration.
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