Trump takes on women’s colleges

The Trump Administration’s obsessions with controlling education and dismantling civil rights converged last month in a typically hyperbolic attack on women’s colleges, specifically on Smith College in Northampton, Mass. 

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is investigating one of the largest and most prestigious women’s colleges, saying it may have violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the civil rights law enacted 54 years ago today to ban sex discrimination in education. Happy Birthday, Title IX!

Since 2015 Smith College has accepted transgender and nonbinary women undergraduates as well as cisgender women. Oddly, OCR is using a civil rights law that championed inclusion for women to argue for exclusion of transgender women. 

Most people, if they know Title IX at all, may know its first 37 words: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…” 

After that, though, it reads, “…except that:” and continues with more than 1,600 words listing exceptions and details. As a private, historically single-sex school, Smith’s admissions policies are not governed by Title IX.

Beyond admissions, schools generally are expected to not discriminate in educational programs and activities. The OCR argues that allowing transgender women into dormitories, locker rooms, and bathrooms could harm “a particular form of sorority and camaraderie” by not providing cisgender-only programs and activities.

It’s a manifestation of what Martin Gerry, a former OCR director under Republican President Gerald Ford, called the “latrine theory” of opposition to civil rights. White people argued against Tile VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it might lead to Black and white students sharing bathrooms. Bernice Sandler, who became known as the “godmother of Title IX,” testified on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s to counter alarmist fears that the ERA would lead to men and women sharing public bathrooms. She pointed out that men and women, boys and girls, already share bathrooms at home and on airplanes, and the world has not fallen apart. Foes of Title IX’s draft regulations in that decade warned that they would force men and women to share bathrooms. Some of the strongest opposition to Section 504 in the 1970s and the Americans with Disabilities Act in the 1980s complained about the cost of making bathrooms accessible. Today, conservative Chicken Littles are afraid of transgender and cisgender women sharing bathrooms or any other facilities. 

Title IX and its regulations allow but don’t require single-sex living facilities, toilets, locker rooms, or showers, so the Administration can’t legally demand these, Smith Professor Carrie Baker and lawyer Mark Sirota noted. Besides, Smith College already has single-stall bathrooms across campus, doors or curtains on toilet stalls, showers, and changing areas in dorms, and private shower and changing areas in locker rooms, they point out.

Plus, the complaint that launched OCR’s investigation didn’t come from any students at Smith but from an outside conservative advocacy group.

So, if the investigation of Smith College isn’t much based on law or students’ experiences, what is OCR doing? 

It’s possible that the Trump Administration will throw any plate of right-wing ideological spaghetti against a legal wall to see what might stick. In its first year the Trump Administration lost more than twice as many challenges to its executive orders as it won, and  lost 70% of lawsuits filed against it.

Perhaps OCR’s weaponization of Title IX is part of the Trump Administration’s shake-downs of prominent colleges and universities to get payments and policy changes from them in response to federal threats to cancel research funding and its demands to destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. 

Or maybe it’s just part of conservatives’ culture-war strategy to turn transgender people into their latest bogeyman in hopes it will win votes. If nothing else, the Trump administration may be hoping that the attack on Smith might generate preemptive compliance with Trump’s policies by other women’s colleges, one legal analysis suggested.

It’s also worth considering some historical underpinnings to the Administration’s actions. For more than 54 years, Republicans fought against Title IX by making up their own definitions of what is or is not sex discrimination, and by accusing others of things they are doing themselves. 

For example, they argued from the beginning that Title IX would destroy men’s athletics by giving some support to women’s athletics – a myth that took a good three and a half decades to wither. Now, conservatives fret that transgender women “steal” playing opportunities from cisgender women, distracting attention from the fact that athletic resources still go predominantly to men.

In the 2000s, the OCR under Republican President George W. Bush issued somewhat vague guidance allowing single-sex education in public K-12 schools, saying it could be beneficial despite a federal report concluding the opposite. The new schools and programs that launched often reinforced gender stereotypes and almost always shortchanged girls. 

Two popular consultants – Lenoard Sax and Michael Gurian – spread what many experts considered quack theories that influenced these programs. Teachers should speak softly to boys, for instance, but yell at girls because of alleged hearing differences. At one West Virginia school, boys could move about freely but girls had to stay in their seats; boys got to play outdoors as rewards after tests and girls only got stickers. The ACLU, National Women’s Law Center, and other legal groups fought this unequal treatment.

So, today, when the Trump Administration tries to tell us what’s good for women while attacking one of the best women’s colleges in the country, be skeptical. Title IX promotes inclusion no matter how they try to use it to exclude women.

(Photos: College Hall in 1875 and Lanning Fountain, both at Smith College, via Wikimedia Commons.)