The story behind Penn’s deal with the Trump administration on trans athletes and Lia Thomas

The University of Pennsylvania did not initially agree to everything federal authorities asked of it over the past participation of transgender athlete Lia Thomas on its women’s swim team, according to a senior U.S. Department of Education official.

But after two months of negotiations, the Ivy League school — with a pause on $175 million of its federal funding — gave into many of the demands from President Donald Trump’s administration.

What was won and lost in the process of reaching the deal announced depends on which side is talking. The agreement, announced July 1, made Penn the first Ivy League school to strike a truce with Trump — at least on this issue — as he seeks to pull funding and force elite schools to adhere to his conservative agenda.

» READ MORE: Penn strikes agreement with Trump administration over trans athletes

The Education Department is “very pleased” with Penn’s willingness to accept the terms and its “good faith” efforts to negotiate, Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an interview.

“We continue to hope that they take their obligation to follow every antidiscrimination law seriously,” Trainor said. “If they don’t, we’ll be watching.”

But the deal, under which Penn agreed to apologize to team members of Thomas, retroactively give Thomas’ individual Penn records to swimmers who held the next-best times, and adhere to a Trump executive order’s definition of male and female in regard to athletics, has stirred strong concern from some inside and outside the Penn community.

Trainor said the agreement stands as “a model” for other universities facing the department’s investigations under Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits sexual harassment and discrimination.

That’s what worries some higher education observers.

» READ MORE: Trump administration restores $175 million to Penn after deal reached on trans athletes

Penn essentially accepted the slap-down for following regulations and federal guidance in place during the 2021-22 season, when Thomas competed, said Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. That could pave the way for other universities to face, and possibly succumb to, the same pressure, he said.

“This opens up the possibility of being investigated for something that you did that was within either laws or guidance at the time just because a new administration disagrees with those priorities,” he said.

Scott L. Bok, former chair of Penn’s board of trustees, said he also worries about the broader impact.

“On the one hand, Penn gave up very little by essentially agreeing to comply with applicable laws and regulations as it has always done,” Bok said of the deal. “On the other hand, it gave those attacking America’s most important universities a valuable win and an opportunity to trumpet the false narrative that Penn was a bad actor that needed to be forced into compliance.

“One can only hope that its capitulation doesn’t increase pressure on its peer institutions to do likewise.”

Bok stepped down in December 2023 after the resignation of Penn president Liz Magill over her congressional testimony regarding the handling of antisemitism on campus.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which allowed the participation of transgender athletes on women’s teams when Thomas competed, banned it earlier this year to comply with a Trump executive order. Even before the Title IX investigation, Penn had said it would comply with the new guidelines. The school also has said that Thomas was the first transgender athlete to compete on its women’s teams and that since then, there have been no others.

Penn was eager to begin negotiations shortly after the department announced the investigation in April, according to the senior Education Department official. A month earlier, in March, the administration had announced it was pausing $175 million in federal funding to the institution because of Thomas’ participation.

» READ MORE: Trump administration demands Penn restore accolades to female swimmers after allowing trans swimmer to compete

The department argued it was not enough for Penn just to agree not to have transgender women compete on its teams again; the school had to redress the wrongs that Thomas’ teammates, several of whom are suing Penn, incurred, the official said.

The university tried to include terms like transgender or males identifying as women in the agreement, but the department would not allow it, the official said.

Ultimately, the school agreed to issue a public statement posted prominently on its website, saying it would abide by Title IX “as interpreted by the Department of Education” in regard to athletics. The school also said it would specifically cite by name Trump’s executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and state that all its “practices, policies, and procedures adopted and implemented by the university with respect to women’s athletics” will comply with that order, as well as a similar order issued in February.

The university’s women’s athletic policies will adhere to the definitions of the words sex, female, male, women, and men as spelled out in Trump’s executive order, the resolution states.

But Penn did not agree to everything, a Penn source said. The school declined to “adopt” the definitions, as the department wanted, but rather agreed to state it would comply with them.

“That’s different,” the source said.

The Penn source also pointed to the fact that the definitions apply only to athletics as another important distinction.

During negotiations, Penn stuck to its argument that the school allowed Thomas to compete because the NCAA permitted it at the time, as did the guidance from the Education Department under President Joe Biden. But the senior Education Department official said the administration rejected that argument, asserting that Penn could have chosen to prohibit Thomas’ participation because it violated Title IX.

“In our judgment, the violations of Title IX were always violations, whether the Biden administration sought to pursue it or not,” Trainor said. “They hid essentially under the NCAA rules at the time.

“They knew what they were doing and they came to us to make it right,” Trainor contended. “And it’s our judgment that on the whole they did make it right and we’re fully confident that they are going to respect the terms of the agreement.”

A day after the agreement was announced, the Trump administration said it had restored the $175 million to Penn that it had paused when announcing the Title IX investigation in April.

A Penn official, however, said last week that the university could not confirm the money had been released.

A White House source said Friday that there are no restrictions to Penn funds and that the full $175 million has been unfrozen.

The Penn grants that were paused, according to the news website NOTUS, included six Department of Defense contracts, deemed “non-mission critical” and worth $26.5 million, and a $146.3 million Department of Health and Human Services contract.

Penn president J. Larry Jameson said at the time that the grants paused would affect “research on preventing hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against deadly viruses, quantum computing, protections against chemical warfare, and student loan programs.”

NOTUS said it obtained emails between Trump administration officials detailing that they decided to target Penn because Trump wanted to see more actions taken against universities and withholding $175 million from “a known university … will make that splash.” The emails were part of a court record over funding freezes by the Department of Government Efficiency, the news site said.

At Penn, faculty senate leaders have not spoken publicly about the agreement, but the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors said Penn allowed the government to use a funding freeze to hold it hostage.

“By following a path of political expediency at the expense of trans athletes, Penn makes all trans students, faculty, staff, and community members less safe, exposing them to renewed and emboldened harassment and discriminatory treatment,” the group’s statement said.

Two faculty members, a lecturer and a tenured professor, have publicly announced their resignations, both calling out the deal.

Carter J. Carter, a lecturer in the doctorate of social work program, said that Penn committed a “morally reprobate act of cowardice” but that it was only the latest example.

Shannon Mattern, a tenured professor of media studies, announced on June 30, the day before the deal between Penn and the Trump administration became public, that she was leaving Penn due to a “fundamental conflict in values.” She listed a multitude of concerns from disparities in resources between professional schools and Arts and Sciences to “powerful alums and board members” who “dictate policies regarding how freedom of expression is interpreted” to the school’s “reprehensible decision to comply” with the Trump administration’s demands regarding Title IX.

Mattern declined to comment last week, saying her resignation “is still in process.”

“We caved,” wrote Penn professor Jonathan Zimmerman in an opinion piece published in The Inquirer. “And we will never live that down.”

Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education who has ardently defended free speech, said it is debatable whether Thomas should have been allowed to compete, but what is not debatable is the “authoritarianism” that Penn capitulated to by agreeing to the deal.

“In a democracy, universities should debate and deliberate contested questions,” he said. “The government shouldn’t dictate the answers, and that’s what is happening here.”

Regaining federal funding is not reason enough to agree, he said.

“What does it profit a university if it gains the whole world of federal dollars and loses its own soul?” he wrote.

Others, while disappointed by the deal, said they understood the difficult position Penn was in, given what the loss of federal funding could mean to the research operation — Penn receives $1 billion in federal funding annually — and graduate student education.

“It felt like they did the best they could with the situation that was in front of them,” said Camille Z. Charles, a professor of sociology, Africana studies, and education.

Claire Finkelstein, a Penn law professor, said Penn really had no choice but to comply with executive orders pending any judicial rulings to the contrary.

“The Supreme Court has now agreed to review two state laws requiring educational institutions to comply with the sex assigned at birth approach to transgender athletes in the case of women’s sports. And that has the potential to make a difference.”

The department, she said, was within its rights to ask Penn to comply with its interpretation of Title IX, but asking for the apologies to swimmers and the changing of records was an “overreach” and an attempt to “humiliate” the school.

“It is wrong for the administration as a general matter to try to demand such detailed actions from universities,” she said. “But given that this is their MO, I don’t think that Penn had a choice.”