Trump Administration Investigates Smith College for Admitting Trans Students

Late on Monday, May 4, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it is opening an investigation into Smith College in Massachusetts for its admission of transgender students, in an expansion of the Trump administration’s attacks on transgender rights.

The Trump administration is suggesting that allowing transgender women to enroll at a women’s college violates civil rights protections for cisgender women.

“Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness and compliance under federal law,” said Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education. “The Trump administration will continue to uphold the law and fight to restore common sense.”

The Trump administration’s targeting of school admissions marks an expansion in its attacks on transgender people, which have included preventing transgender athletes from competing in sports congruent with their gender identity, controlling access to public bathrooms, banning access to gender-affirming medical care, and requiring passports to match sex assigned at birth.

The Department of Education is claiming that Smith’s admittance of transgender students violates Title IX, the federal law that aims to prevent gender-based discrimination in education. Title IX includes an exception for all-male or all-female colleges — but the department claims this applies only to “biological sex differences, not subjective gender identity.”

Smith, one of the largest women’s colleges in the U.S., has admitted transgender women since 2015.

The investigation was sparked by a complaint made by conservative watchdog group Defending Education in 2025. The vice president of Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint against Smith, pushing for an investigation. This was after Smith awarded Rachel Levine, a transgender woman and former assistant secretary for health under President Joe Biden, an honorary degree and invited her to speak at the college.

Levine has frequently come under attack by the Trump administration as it has made suppression of transgender rights a central issue in its policy. In an added layer of cruelty, the administration has even changed Levine’s name to her pre-transition name on her official portrait at the Department of Health and Human Services.

In response to the Trump administration’s announcement on Monday, Smith College spokesperson Carolyn McDaniel wrote that the college is “fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws. The College does not comment on pending government investigations.”

However, last year Smith said that it would adhere to a new policy from the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibiting transgender women from playing in women’s sports. This echoes a repeated pattern of colleges adhering to Trump’s increasingly draconian demands, rather than refusing to comply.

GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, a legal organization that advocates for LGBTQ people, condemned the administration’s investigation into Smith. “The administration is not protecting women’s colleges; it is trying to control them,” they said in a statement, adding that the investigation was “patronizing and profoundly offensive.”

“Smith and sister colleges were created to empower and educate by building institutions run by and for women, not to have federal officials dictate the meaning of women’s education from Washington,” the group went on. “This administration is pushing an idea of sex that would ultimately not have women attend college at all.”