Education Department opens Title IX investigation into Smith College over its policy of admitting transgender women

On May 4, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened a Title IX investigation into Smith College, an all-women's liberal-arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts, over its policy of admitting transgender women. In a press release, the department said OCR would determine whether the college violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by "admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams." The department's position is that the statute's single-sex exception, which allows colleges to enroll an all-male or all-female student body, applies "on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity," and that an institution admitting "male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex." Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said an "all-women's college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males."

Smith College has admitted transgender women since 2015, when its board of trustees revised the admissions policy; the school says it considers applicants who self-identify as women, including "cis, trans, and nonbinary women." The investigation traces to a June 2025 complaint filed with OCR by Defending Education, a conservative legal group, which according to the issue flagged Smith after the college honored and invited Adm. Rachel L. Levine — a transgender former assistant secretary for health — as a commencement speaker. The action is part of a broader pattern of federal civil-rights enforcement directed at transgender people; it is a counterpart to the DOJ subpoena campaign for trans-youth medical records documented at src/entries/2026/05/13/issue-94-federal-targeting-marginalized-communities.md.

The investigation is a completed government action — the probe was formally opened, not merely proposed — with a federal agency wielding its enforcement power against an institution's transgender-inclusion policy, which is the basis for mapping it to targeting-marginalized-communities and discriminatory-policy. The legal merits remain contested: some legal analysts have noted that Title IX's admissions provisions, by their terms, do not clearly reach private undergraduate colleges such as Smith, a question that any enforcement action would have to confront. The college did not immediately comment on the investigation.