Smith College, Title IX, and the Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough

On the sidewalks around Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, this week, chalk messages appeared: You belong here. Trans women belong here. A blue, white, and pink transgender pride flag drawn in pastel on concrete. They were responses to something that had just happened 100 miles away in Washington: the U.S. Department of Education announced it was opening a civil rights investigation into Smith College for admitting transgender women.

Smith has admitted trans women since 2015. There have been no known complaints, no federal findings of harm, no pattern of student grievance that generated this inquiry. The investigation was reportedly triggered after a conservative watchdog group flagged Smith's 2025 decision to award an honorary degree to Admiral Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate.

The Legal Problem

Legal experts across the political spectrum have described the investigation as legally puzzling. Title IX's single-sex exception allows private colleges to maintain single-sex admissions, but the exception is structured around institutional choice, not federal enforcement of biological sex definitions. The Education Department's argument, that a women's college loses all meaning if it admits trans women, is a policy position, not a legal standard with clear statutory grounding.

Kimberly Richey, the administration's Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, stated that allowing trans women into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law. But no specific prior violation had been identified. The investigation itself is the mechanism for creating the appearance of one.

What Is Actually at Stake

Smith is not the only school watching. Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, both of which also admit transgender women, are equally exposed. An adverse finding against Smith, or even a prolonged investigation combined with threats to federal funding, could pressure all three institutions to change admissions policies their own communities developed and endorsed.

The broader pattern is one the administration has deployed consistently: use regulatory investigations and the threat of federal funding withdrawal to reshape institutional behavior without passing new legislation. Universities, hospitals, and law firms have all faced versions of this pressure. The legal basis does not always have to be airtight. The leverage is the investigation itself.

The Deeper Question

Women's colleges were founded to give women access to the highest levels of education at a time when most institutions would not admit them. Their identity has never been static. Smith's 2015 decision to admit trans women was made after years of student organizing and institutional deliberation. The federal government is now inserting itself into that deliberation, not because any student was harmed, but because the administration disagrees with the conclusion Smith reached. That is a different kind of civil rights claim than the ones Title IX was designed to address.