The University of Pennsylvania has settled a federal civil rights case by prohibiting transgender women from joining its women’s sports teams, following allegations of rights violations against female athletes.
The U.S. Education Department disclosed this voluntary settlement on Tuesday. The case was centered around Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer who previously competed for the school when she made history as the first openly transgender competitor to secure a Division I championship in 2022.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s broader attempt to remove transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.
As part of the settlement, Penn has promised to reinstate all swimming records and titles in Division I formerly claimed by Lia Thomas to the original female athletes, according to the Education Department. Additionally, Penn has agreed to issue personalized apology letters to every impacted swimmer.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Thomas would be stripped of her awards and honors at Penn.
The university must also announce that it “will not allow males to compete in female athletic programs, “and it must adopt “biology-based” definitions of male and female, the department said.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon called it a victory for women and girls.
“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,” McMahon said in a statement.
The Education Department opened its investigation in February and concluded in April that Penn had violated Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding sex discrimination in education. Such findings have almost always been resolved through voluntary agreements. If Penn had fought the finding, the department could have moved to refer the case to the Justice Department or pursued a separate process to cut the school’s federal funding.
In February, the Education Department asked the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, or NFSHSA, to restore titles, awards and records it says have been “misappropriated by biological males competing in female categories.”
The most obvious target at the college level was in women’s swimming, where Thomas won the national title in the 500-yard freestyle in 2022.
The NCAA has updated its record books when recruiting and other violations have stripped titles from certain schools, but the organization, like the NFSHSA, has not responded to the federal government’s request. Determining which events had a transgender athlete participating years later would be challenging.
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