On February 6, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened Title IX investigations into a middle and high school athletics association and two universities that it says have allowed transgender women and girls to participate on teams corresponding with their gender identity. The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, San José State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, are being investigated. In addition, it is reported that OCR is reviewing athletics participation policies at “a number of schools.”

The investigations are in response to an executive order barring transgender women from playing on women’s sports teams and threatening to pull federal funding from educational institutions that don’t comply.

OCR is also taking aim at the term “transgender ideology,” which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is often used by anti-LGBTQ+ groups to imply that someone’s transgender identity “is not real but is instead a belief system that is imposed on others.”

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