The U.S. Education Department announced Tuesday that the University of Pennsylvania has agreed to ban transgender athletes from its women’s sports teams in order to resolve a federal civil rights case that found the university violated female athletes’ rights, the Associated Press reported.
The case, brought on by the administration of President Donald Trump, followed an investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights that focused on swimmer Lia Thomas. Thomas, a political target of Republicans and Trump over the past several years, last competed for the Quakers in 2022, when she became the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I title (women’s 500-yard freestyle).
The case said that Penn, an Ivy League school, violated Title IX — the 1972 law forbidding sex discrimination in education — because the school was “denying women equal opportunities by permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”
In addition to announcing it “will not allow males to compete in female athletic programs” and will adopt “biology-based” definitions of male and female, Penn will restore all individual D-I swimming records and titles to female athletes whose achievements Thomas surpassed. Furthermore, the university will send apology letters to those swimmers, according to the Education Department.
“The Department commends UPenn for rectifying its past harms against women and girls, and we will continue to fight relentlessly to restore Title IX’s proper application and enforce it to the fullest extent of the law,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.
This is the latest development in what’s been a wider attempt from the Trump administration to remove transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports. In February, the Education Department asked the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations to restore all honors that were “misappropriated by biological males competing in female categories.”