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Another major university has capitulated to the Trump administration’s attacks on transgender rights. On Tuesday, the Department of Education and the University of Pennsylvania announced that the school will block transgender athletes from women’s sports teams as part of an agreement UPenn made with the federal government, CNN reports.
The Department also said the university will erase records set by Lia Thomas, who in 2022 became the school’s first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division 1 title when she won the women’s 500-yard freestyle. (Thomas competed on the men’s team before transitioning.) In February — just one day after Trump signed an executive order moving to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports — the NCAA changed its participation policy to limit competition in women’s sports to athletes assigned female at birth, with NCAA president Charlie Baker calling Trump’s order a “clear, national standard” in a statement at the time.
Also in February, the Department of Education opened an investigation into the University of Pennsylvania, concluding in April that the school had violated Title IX and the rights of its female athletes — a win for the Trump administration’s wider push to oust transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports. During the investigation, the White House cut $175 million in federal funding to the school. CNN reports that it’s “unclear” as to whether that money will now be restored to the University of Pennsylvania.
In the meantime, it certainly sounds like the school is bending the knee: Under the terms of the new agreement, UPenn will restore Division I records and titles to athletes who lost to Thomas, and send them personalized apology letters. The Department also says the university must announce that it “will not allow males to compete in female athletic” programs and must use “biology-based” definitions of male and female.
Following news of the agreement, the university has been doing its fair share of embarrassing bloviation. “While Penn’s policies during the 2021–2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” University of Pennsylvania president J. Larry Jameson said in a news release about the agreement on Tuesday. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxieties because of the policies in effect at the time,” adding that the university has now brought “a close to an investigation that, if unresolved, could have had significant and lasting implications” for the school. Of course, there was no mentioned of the lasting impact the decision will have on trans athletes.
Thomas has yet to publicly comment on the university’s agreement. Addressing the bigotry she faced on the swim team with Sports Illustrated in 2022 — teammates apparently asked to exclude her from the conference championship meet, and parents openly opposed her eligibility to compete — Thomas said: “The very simple answer is that I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team. Trans people deserve that same respect that every other athlete gets.”