Taking Title IX seriously

Just over three years ago, Riley Gaines famously tied for fifth with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a man who identified as a woman, at the Division I NCAA swimming championships. Gaines and Thomas swam an identical 1:43:40 in the Women’s 200-yard Freestyle. Yet the NCAA representative awarded the trophy to Thomas and told Gaines, “We went ahead and gave the fifth place trophy to Lia, but you can pose on the podium with the sixth place trophy.” No coin flip, no discussion, no explanation, just the elevation of a male over a female swimmer after a tie. This week some of those chickens are finally coming home to roost as the White House announced that it is freezing $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its athletic policies that allowed Thomas to swim against women.

The picture of Riley and Lia at the podium struck a national nerve. When he was elected, President Trump made good on his campaign promises to ensure equal educational opportunities for women, including in sports. He issued an executive order entitled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The order explains that, in recent years, “educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports. This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”

The executive order goes on to warn universities that, in order to receive federal funding, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 requires them to provide women with an equal opportunity to participate in competitive sports. The White House announced: “it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.” The president also directed the secretary of education to coordinate with the United States attorney general to prioritize Title IX enforcement actions against colleges and universities that have denied female students this equal opportunity to participate in sports by requiring them to compete against male students.

So far, the Department of Education has initiated four Title IX investigations, two of them against universities. San Jose State University is under investigation for allowing a male athlete to compete on the women’s volleyball team, forcing competing teams to forfeit games to protect their female athletes. In February, the Department of Education launched an investigation into UPenn over alleged violations of Title IX. The University of Pennsylvania earned itself an investigation by awarding Lia Thomas a spot on the roster of the women’s swimming and diving team and, according to a former teammate of Thomas’, offering the women’s swim team “psychological services” to re-educate them “to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male.” That investigation could result in denial of all federal funding. And UPenn receives a whopping $1 billion from the federal fisc.

The freeze announced last Wednesday, while unrelated to the department’s Title IX investigation, was implemented because of its harmful athletic policies. The $175 million in funding cuts comes from discretionary federal funding streams. According to a White House official, the funding cuts would come from the millions in federal grants and contracts awarded by the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The University of Pennsylvania is the second Ivy League university to lose hundreds of millions in federal funds this year. Earlier this month, the administration canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Regarding UPenn’s contract cancellations, many swimmers who had competed alongside UPenn’s Thomas celebrated the funding pause. Three of Thomas’ former UPenn teammates issued a statement: “We are so glad that Universities are beginning to see that there is a cost to openly harming female students on their campuses and we hope the pressure only increases.”

As for Riley, she posted the photo of her standing below Thomas on the podium despite the tie, writing: “three years ago to the day I raced and tied a man at the DI NCAA Championships in the 200 freestyle. Today, the Trump administration paused $175M in federal funding to the University [of] Pennsylvania for this reason. Serendipitous.”

And about time. Every woman on our college campuses deserves to enjoy the protection guaranteed by Title IX. And every female athlete deserves an equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.