The University of Pennsylvania must erase transgender swimmer Lia Thomas from its women’s record books or risk federal charges under a resolution agreement proposed Monday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
The office drew up the agreement after finding that the university violated Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education, by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.”
The university has 10 days to “voluntarily resolve these violations or risk a referral to the U.S. Justice Department for enforcement proceedings,” the office said.
The announcement did not specifically mention Thomas, but the Penn graduate may well be the most famous transgender athlete in the world as the first male-born athlete to win an NCAA Division I women’s crown at the 2022 swimming championships.
That year, Thomas swam on the same team as Paula Scanlan and competed against University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines. Both are now prominent advocates of single-sex women’s sports.
“Little girls who look up to Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan can find hope in today’s action – the Trump Administration will not allow male athletes to invade female private spaces or compete in female categories,” said Craig Traitor, the DOE’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights.
The resolution agreement requires Penn to bar male-born athletes from female sports as well as restore all “individual athletic records, titles, honors, awards or similar recognition for Division I swimming competitions misappropriated by male athletes competing in female categories.”
The agreement also calls on the university to send a letter apologizing to each female athlete affected by the restored honors “for allowing her educational experience in athletics to be marred by sex discrimination.”
“UPenn has a choice to make: do the right thing for its female students and come into full compliance with Title IX immediately or continue to advance an extremist political project that violates federal antidiscrimination law and puts UPenn’s federal funding at risk,” he said.
In March, the administration paused $175 million in federal contracts to the university, prompting University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson to point out that the athletic department has always been in compliance with the NCAA’s rules on transgender athletes.
“Beginning in 2010, the NCAA required that transgender student-athletes be permitted to participate on college teams,” he said in a March 25 statement. “Penn has never had a transgender student-athlete policy of its own.”
Penn allowed Thomas to compete on the women’s team after swimming for three years on the men’s team under the NCAA’s policy, which at the time required male-born athletes to undergo a year of testosterone suppression before joining the women’s side.
The NCAA threw out its transgender policy and barred biological males from women’s sports a day after President Trump signed on Feb. 5 the “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order.
So is my alma mater finally going to issue me an apology or are they just going to pretend like this didn’t happen?  https://t.co/DoM8Ktz1Br
— Paula Scanlan (@PaulaYScanlan) April 28, 2025
The university would have no authority to revoke Thomas’s NCAA Division I title, but Thomas also set multiple school records during the 2021-22 season.
Scanlan has argued that the university should have known better than to allow an intact male to undress – and watch female swimmers undress – in the women’s locker room.
She also accused the athletic department of warning female swimmers against speaking out against having Thomas on the team, and referred those troubled by the situation to psychological services.
“To sum up the university’s response: we, the women, were the problem, not the victims,” she said in her 2023 congressional testimony. “We were expected to conform — to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and fear-mongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”
