The College of Pennsylvania should erase transgender swimmer Lia Thomas from its girls’s file books or danger federal costs underneath a decision settlement proposed Monday by the Division of Schooling’s Workplace for Civil Rights.
The workplace drew up the settlement after discovering that the college violated Title IX, the federal regulation banning intercourse discrimination in training, by “allowing males to compete in girls’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate services.”
The college has 10 days to “voluntarily resolve these violations or danger a referral to the U.S. Justice Department for enforcement proceedings,” the workplace stated.
The announcement didn’t particularly point out Thomas, however the Penn graduate might be essentially the most well-known transgender athlete on this planet as the primary male-born athlete to win an NCAA Division I girls’s crown on the 2022 swimming championships.
That 12 months, Thomas swam on the identical staff as Paula Scanlan and competed towards College of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines. Each are actually distinguished advocates of single-sex girls’s sports activities.
“Little women who look as much as Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan can discover hope in as we speak’s motion – the Trump Administration won’t permit male athletes to invade feminine personal areas or compete in feminine classes,” stated Craig Traitor, the DOE’s appearing assistant secretary for civil rights.
The decision settlement requires Penn to bar male-born athletes from feminine sports activities in addition to restore all “particular person athletic information, titles, honors, awards or comparable recognition for Division I swimming competitions misappropriated by male athletes competing in feminine classes.”
The settlement additionally calls on the college to ship a letter apologizing to every feminine athlete affected by the restored honors “for permitting her instructional expertise in athletics to be marred by intercourse discrimination.”
“UPenn has a option to make: do the fitting factor for its feminine college students and are available into full compliance with Title IX instantly or proceed to advance an extremist political challenge that violates federal antidiscrimination regulation and places UPenn’s federal funding in danger,” he stated.
In March, the administration paused $175 million in federal contracts to the college, prompting College of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson to level out that the athletic department has at all times been in compliance with the NCAA’s guidelines on transgender athletes.
“Starting in 2010, the NCAA required that transgender student-athletes be permitted to take part on school groups,” he stated in a March 25 assertion. “Penn has by no means had a transgender student-athlete coverage of its personal.”
Penn allowed Thomas to compete on the ladies’s staff after swimming for 3 years on the boys’s staff underneath the NCAA’s coverage, which on the time required male-born athletes to bear a 12 months of testosterone suppression earlier than becoming a member of the ladies’s aspect.
The NCAA threw out its transgender coverage and barred organic males from girls’s sports activities a day after President Trump signed on Feb. 5 the “Holding Males Out of Ladies’s Sports activities” government order.
So is my alma mater lastly going to concern me an apology or are they only going to fake like this didn’t occur?  https://t.co/DoM8Ktz1Br
— Paula Scanlan (@PaulaYScanlan) April 28, 2025
The college would don’t have any authority to revoke Thomas’s NCAA Division I title, however Thomas additionally set a number of college information through the 2021-22 season.
Scanlan has argued that the college ought to have recognized higher than to permit an intact male to undress – and watch feminine swimmers undress – within the girls’s locker room.
She additionally accused the athletic department of warning feminine swimmers towards talking out towards having Thomas on the staff, and referred these troubled by the scenario to psychological companies.
“To sum up the college’s response: we, the ladies, have been the issue, not the victims,” she stated in her 2023 congressional testimony. “We have been anticipated to adapt — to maneuver over and shut up. Our emotions didn’t matter. The college was gaslighting and fear-mongering girls to validate the sentiments and id of a male.”
