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| Dún Laoghaire Ireland on June 18, 2025 |
You may have heard that Penn president J. Larry Jameson settled with Trump’s Department of Education over the alleged Title IX violation of allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete for the Penn’s women’s team in 2021-22. This was actually Title IX compliance, since NCAA and Title IX guidance then required Penn to include trans women in women’s sports. (The Athletic has a good overview. See also Johanna Alonso at IHE.)
The Trump Administration approaches most issues through coercive bargaining. The play is always the same: accusation, conviction and punishment come first, pleading out the charges come after. “First I hit you in the face. Then we’ll sit down to make a deal.”
Penn had the same three main choices as do other universities.
1. Comply with current policy as demanded by the Administration. In this case, that means the outcomes described by the Department of Education: “specifying that UPenn will not allow males to compete in female athletic programs or occupy Penn Athletics female intimate facilities.”
Penn also went the extra mile: “UPenn will adopt biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ pursuant to Title IX and consistent with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” (If the agreement said “consistent with biological science” it would have the opposite of Trump’s intended effect, but it’s Trump defining the biology of the Penn agreement.)
2. Contest the policy on procedure or substance or both. Build alliances to organize independent policy formation through federal procedures. In this case, that would mean the NCAA, Ivy League Athletics, etc., continuing to defend Biden-era Title IX rules for trans inclusion on various grounds: harms exaggerated and politicized rather than defined; known biology analyzed and incorporated; and equity, ethical, psychological, and rights issues accomodated. One goal would be creating a better public discussion to counter the current bigoted and dangerous discourse established by Trump’s Executive Orders.
3. Comply with current Trump policy and also retroactively repudiate your own.
Option 3 has become more likely as U.S. elites have largely collapsed before Trump’s coercive bargaining. They seem to think playing dead will make Trump go away. This also means that Option 2 isn’t happening, though it has to happen if higher education is to recover its autonomy.
Some university administrators, like Penn’s, also erase the difference between Options 1 and 3. They aren’t only knuckling under to rules they opposed only months ago, doing U-turns to unfreeze federal funds that the Administration has unlawfully withheld. In Penn’s case, they are in effect endorsing the Trump-McMahon position and repudiating their own.
Penn’s president Jameson did this when he agreed to McMahon’s language and then stripped Thomas of her medals. Treating her like a cyclist caught doping says that she cheated in the competitions because a trans woman is not a woman. McMahon’s Department of Education confirms this when it writes, “The Department commends UPenn for rectifying its past harms against women and girls.”
Penn’s Note on their record page makes it worse. ““Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season.” In other words, she competed because of a regulatory fluke, and very much not because trans women are women.
Penn’s settlement is a Pandora’s box from which many bad conclusions can now be drawn by the wider public. Here are six.
1. University modes are wrong (science, gender studies) and “traditional values” are right.
2. Civil rights means excluding transgender people, not including them.
3. Universities pretend they care about vulnerable and oppressed people because they stand for principle. But they will not fight for them. They’ll take the money instead.
4. Universities demand independence on the grounds that they answer to a higher power—thought itself—but they answer to power, just like everybody else.
5. Trans women are not vulnerable people in need of civil rights protections but oppressors, starting with oppressors of cis-women. (See McMahon’s testimonials.)
6. Universities are wrong and Trump is right. (That is the headline for the whole saga.)
Universities are supposed to stand up for truth even when it is unpopular. Here Penn endorses fake truth and the premises of Trumpian persecution. This undermines public respect for university research findings and deepens society’s knowledge crisi.
In a single capitulation, Penn’s administration has made both transgender people and universities easier prey to Trumpism.
My heart goes out to the former, including Lia Thomas. As for the latter, senior administrators--my god what will school these people?