NORTHAMPTON — A conservative watchdog group has filed a civil rights complaint with the US Department of Education against Smith College, taking aim at the school’s decade-old policy of admitting self-identified transgender women.
The filing, announced this month by the group Defending Education, highlights the vulnerabilities for Smith and other women’s colleges that for years have been grappling with a shifting culture around gender identity. While the complaint on its own doesn’t require the college to change its policies, its language echoes arguments made by the Trump administration in similar cases — including a finding this week against California’s state education department.
Defending Education filed the complaint with the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights last Friday, alleging violations of Title IX, an education law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs that receive federal financial assistance. If the office finds the complaint is valid, it could jeopardize Smith’s access to federal funding.
At the core of the complaint is an argument that Smith has discriminated against “biological women” by admitting people who were born as men but now identify as women. People who were born as women but now identify as men, the complaint points out, are not eligible for admission at Smith.
“As one of the oldest women’s institutions in the country, Smith College continues to hold itself out to be for women only, and yet admits natal males who identify as females,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, said in a statement to the Globe.
According to Smith’s website, the school currently “considers for admission any applicants who self-identify as women,” including those who are cis, trans, and nonbinary.
The Daily Wire first reported on the complaint on Monday.
A Smith College spokesperson told the Globe Tuesday that the school had not received any official notification of the complaint. College leadership declined to provide further comment.
The complaint surfaces a fundamental ideological rift over the difference between sex and gender, while getting at the question of what it means to be a woman — and, by extension, what it means to be a women’s college.
Mount Holyoke, for example, calls itself “the leading gender-diverse women’s college,” as it welcomes transgender men, along with transgender women, and nonbinary students, regardless of sex assigned at birth. Wellesley says it will consider an applicant “who lives as a woman and consistently identifies as a woman.”
Since taking power in January, the Trump administration has set about dismantling protections for transgender people in the name of “defending women.”
President Trump has signed executive orders aimed at shutting down programs and grants that “promote gender ideology,” and banning transgender athletes from girl’s and women’s sports. Education Secretary Linda McMahon earlier this month announced new DOE initiatives to “vindicate women’s rights“ through Title IX investigations into trans-inclusive spaces.
“Trans students aren’t an afterthought right now,” said Heron Greenesmith, deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center. “They are at the heart of the administration’s racist, anti-bodily-autonomy agenda.”
Defending Education argues that Smith’s trans inclusion means exclusion for biological females who, as a result, have fewer acceptance slots. In a striking twist, the group also suggests Smith is guilty of “sex discrimination” for barring self-identified transgender men from admission.
“Smith would be better served by opening its doors to all applicants and becoming a coed institution, rather than play politics with sex and gender identity,” Perry said.
It’s yet to be seen whether the Education Department will investigate the allegations against Smith, but Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University and a member of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said Title IX is now being weaponized against protecting gender-based equality when it was designed to eliminate discrimination. Lieberwitz compared the approach to the way the administration is using Title VI complaints about antisemitism to attempt to exert control over universities including Harvard.
“I think this is a unique claim — they’re testing the waters for them going after others,“ said Joan Wallach Scott, a gender historian and fellow member of AAUP.
“It certainly is an opening into prosecuting places that tolerate trans women; this is bigger than just trans athletes,” she said.
Part of the point is “to force accommodation or to scare” other higher education institutions, she added. “Smith becomes the example.”
If the Education Department finds Smith in violation of Title IX, the administration could try to go after federal student aid, even though there are protections in place that limit how much funding can be pulled, said Shiwali Patel, Title IX lawyer and senior director of Safe and Inclusive Schools at the National Women’s Law Center.
“This isn’t about protecting women and girls,” Patel said. “It’s about forcing the school to discriminate and to not support a vulnerable group of students, and to make them unwelcomed.”
Smith changed its admissions policy to include self-identified transgender women in May 2015. The college, which has faced years of competing accusations that it was going too far — or not far enough — in welcoming students along the gender spectrum, now provides access to gender-neutral restrooms and gender-affirming care. A bias response team tracks bias incidents “to maintain an inclusive campus,” according to the college’s website.
The irony, said Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is how long it took historically women’s colleges like Smith to accept transgender women in the first place.
“Smith had actively resisted becoming trans-inclusive. It took a concerted campaign by students before the college would agree to admit qualified trans women, and then for years the school still would not knowingly consider nonbinary students assigned female at birth,” Beemyn said.
Defending Education characterizes Smith’s current policies as either violating or encroaching on the rights of “biological women” under Title IX, a depiction opponents say is a willful misinterpretation of the landmark civil rights law that’s gaining traction.
On June 2, the Education Department announced it is celebrating June as “Title IX Month,” in honor of the 53rd anniversary of the law, while launching “directed investigations” into the University of Wyoming and Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado “for allegedly allowing males to join and live in female-only intimate and communal spaces.”
When contacted by the Globe, the department said it does not confirm complaints but reaffirmed the Trump administration’s commitment to “restoring women’s civil rights by enforcing Title IX as it is written.”
“The Biden Administration stretched the scope of Title IX beyond its statutory purview to include ‘gender identity,’ thereby eroding the sex-based protections guaranteed to women,” Education Department spokesperson Julie Hartman said in an emailed statement. The department “will fight on every front to protect women’s sports and intimate spaces, and to reestablish Title IX’s application within its lawful boundaries.”
Defending Education bills itself as a “national, grassroots nonprofit empowering parents to advocate for classrooms that educate — not indoctrinate.“
Originally called Parents Defending Education, the group changed its name in April to reflect its expansion into higher education.
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.