U Penn agrees to apologize for allowing men into women’s sports
And not just “allowing” but rather forcing women to accept the invasion.
Transgender swimming champion Lia Thomas will be stripped of University of Pennsylvania swimming titles after the Ivy League school bowed to pressure from the Trump administration.
The university will also issue formal apologies to every biological female competitor who lost out to a transgender competitor following an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
The probe found UPenn violated Title IX by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities.”
“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.
Swimmer Lia Thomas was and is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-equipped post-pubescent biological male. He had no business being in a woman’s locker room, and the fact that U Penn forced such a thing on its female swimmers was a terrible offense.
So, at the very least, the university won’t be doing that anymore – until, of course, Democrats take control of the federal government and redefine what Title IX means.
Or perhaps the left has learned its lesson on this, although I wouldn’t count on it. And by “its lesson,” I mean the practical lesson that forcing men into women’s locker rooms isn’t a popular stance, and may have contributed heavily to Democrats’ losses in 2024. I don’t expect that the left would learn the moral lesson or the lesson about biology.
I agree.
And if you’ll allow me to paraphrase one of your sentences: “…the practical lesson that forcing men into women’s locker rooms isn’t”…a [safe] activity, and doing vice versa isn’t a safe activity, either.
Unless it’s a space for “all genders”, it’s safer for people to only go into the spaces, assigned to their biological gender.
Oh, I imagine they can always “de-apologize”, claiming that they were “FORCED”, “COERCED”, THREATENED” to apologize…by Demon Jaws Trump and his Nazi cohort…and/or depending on whether the DPOTUS—with its resourceful imagination and robust philosophy of “American” values—can “win” another election…
That this was allowed to happen at a major university, an Ivy League school no less, shows how completely lost our ruling institutions are.
Because it was an Ivy League school, every single girl went along with having Thomas in their locker rooms. After the fact, one or two came out and and said it was traumatic, but none spoke out while they were on the team, and as far as I know, no one quit the team while Thomas was on it.
They wouldn’t give up their precious Ivy League diploma and credential for all the abuse and trauma in the world. Complaining about Thomas and risking getting kicked off the team or simply quitting the swim team were not options for them, as being part of a Division I sports team would have been a key element of their applications to medical or law school.
On the other hand, many of the girls on the team were likely pleased to have Thomas on the team with them. Painting yourself as a fierce defender of Thomas in the face of “overwhelming” bigotry and hate would look very good on one of those medical or law school applications.
Democrats will soon regain power in this country and likely never give it back up. This will never end until almost every single spot on every single women’s sports team in the country is taken by mediocre male athletes, so the quicker that happens the better.
As I have pointed out before, gender is just a social construction and therefore imaginary. I have asked people to explain the physical basis of gender and nobody can.
Dear smelting,
Re “They wouldn’t give up their precious Ivy League diploma and credential for all the abuse and trauma in the world. Complaining about Thomas and risking getting kicked off the team or simply quitting the swim team were not options for them, as being part of a Division I sports team would have been a key element of their applications to medical or law school.”
I find it sad and OFFENSIVE to put all or most of the blame on the young adults who are in a situation where, unlike established adults, they are still boxed in by authorities ruling the biggest aspects of their futures.
smelting:
Thomas swam on the U Penn women’s swim team for the 2021-2022 season. See this for what the swimmers were doing about it during that time, as well as this for what the parents were doing.
Your ire at the young women seems to me to be misplaced. They’d been training almost their entire lives for the opportunity to swim on the team. It was U Penn that betrayed them.
Your ire at the young women seems to me to be misplaced.
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They turned him down again and again.
Penn has a 45 member board which is largely self-regenerating. If they had an eleven member board elected by a postal ballot of those alumni registered to vote in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and that balloting was supervised by the state board of elections, they might just be supervised by people with some critical distance from the faddish status-signaling and gaslighting to which faculty and school administration are prone. Might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.
This one lesson – call it an electoral lesson, because I think neo is right that we can’t count on the left to learn a moral lesson – ought to be the biggest takeaway from the 2024 election. It ought to be, precisely because it shouldn’t be. Transgenderism affects (or should affect) only a tiny fraction of people, yet the Democrats made it their hill to die on.
The wild unpopularity of open borders and government-assisted abuse of the asylum system ought to have been the major takeaway, because it affects so many more people, and because the Democrats should have shunted aside the trans thing. But they didn’t set it aside; they kept on doubling down and doubling down, such that ordinary Americans rightly concluded that Democrats care more about the feelings of a teensy but extremely vocal and disturbed group of people – who, by all appearances, are coming for children every chance they get – than they care about the lives and livelihoods of the same ordinary Americans.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/07/claire-shipman-is-sorry.php
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Four remarks:
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A. The influence of the university president (or that of any other employee of the school) on the composition of the board of trustees should be zero.
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B. IMO, college presidents should be concerned with physical plant, budget, fundraising, and promotion and should be drawn from outside the world of faculty and educational administration. They can offer their opinions to the board on course offerings or faculty tenure and promotion, but it should be the board’s call on that. If you’re considering an educational administrator for the position of president, consider only those who specialized in finance or physical plant. If you’re considering a quondam faculty member, look for those who have spent a dozen years in executive positions where mollifying faculty was not part of the job description; can be in business, the military, general philanthropy, or general public administration. One thing it is perverse to do is hire for your interim president a broadcast journalist.
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C. The board should not be unwieldy and should be elected by alumni registered to vote in the state where the school’s principal campuses are located. Such elections should be by postal ballot and supervised by the state and county board of elections.
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D. Higher ed administrators cannot for the life of them promulgate impartial behavioral rules and enforce them honestly and consistently. It’s always about favoring one segment over another.
And meanwhile, women’s right’s groups still remain totally silent.
Then again, maybe it’s because Michelle “it’s – been-a-struggle” Obama had been hogging the women’s lib airspace.
‘Women’s rights’ groups have not in the post-war period agitated in favor of actual liberties for women and have sought nothing salutary.
So college prez, mayors and governors are supposed to the majordomo and not the freaking king. A high end servant.