Basics
- Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
- Pyrophore IFF: 🟥 Collaborationist
Detail
The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) is an institution of tertiary education located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It is considered a member of the Ivy League, a group of US universities traditionally perceived as elite.
Timeline
2025, February 6. The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), as part of the newly inaugurated second administration of Republican US President Donald Trump, opens an investigation into UPenn and two other schools for “Title IX violations” (US Department of Education, 2025a) meaning in this context that the schools are being investigated for treating trans women as women.
2025, April 28. OCR closes its investigation, asserting that UPenn violated Title IX by allowing trans women to compete as women (US Department of Education, 2025b).
2025, July 1. The US Department of Education announces that UPenn has decided to collaborate with the Trump administration with respect to trans athletes. The collaboration is formalised by a Resolution Agreement related to the Title IX investigation initiated in February. According to the press release from the Department (ibid), measures which UPenn commits to take as part of the Resolution Agreement include:
- falsifying UPenn’s NCAA Division I women’s “swimming records, titles, or similar recognitions” to indicate that those which were received by a transfem athlete were actually received by the cis woman athlete who would have received them if no trans women had been allowed to compete;
- issuing a public statement that:
- trans women will not be allowed to compete as women and that they will not be allowed to use correctly gendered UPenn locker rooms and other gendered facilities;
- UPenn will “adopt … definitions” of the words “male” and “female” which treat an individual’s “male” or “female” status as being determined by their sex assigned at birth;
- posting that statement “in a prominent location on its main website and on each of its websites for women’s athletics”;
- “rescind[ing] any guidance … [and] remov[ing] or revis[ing] any internal and public-facing statements or documents” that treat trans people as having their correct gender, and notifying “all staff and women’s athletics of all such rescissions”; and
- sending personalised letters of apology to Paula Scanlan and any other anti-trans activists on the UPenn swimming team.
While she is not named, the measures related to UPenn swimming in particular are clearly intended to humiliate and denigrate Lia Thomas, the UPenn swimmer who was artificially targeted for an anti-trans cause celebre by fascist activists and other mainstream right-wing interests in the early 2020s.
References
US Department of Education (2025a, February 6). U.S. Department of Education to investigate Title IX violations in athletics. Retrieved 2 July 2025.
US Department of Education (2025b, July 1). U.S. Department of Education announces the University of Pennsylvania has entered into a Resolution Agreement to resolve its Title IX violations. Retrieved 2 July 2025.
Metadata
- Revision: 2 (2 July 2025).
- Created: 2 July 2025.