The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes the University of Pennsylvania’s (UPenn) agreement to resolve its Title IX violations. The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to the following:
- UPenn will restore to female athletes all individual UPenn Division I swimming records, titles, or similar recognitions which were misappropriated by male athletes allowed to compete in female categories;
- UPenn will issue a public statement to the University community stating that it will comply with Title IX, specifying that UPenn will not allow males to compete in female athletic programs or occupy Penn Athletics female intimate facilities;
- The statement will specify that UPenn will adopt biology-based definitions for the words “male” and “female” pursuant to Title IX and consistent with President Trump’s Executive Orders “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” and “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”;
- UPenn will post the statement in a prominent location on its main website and on each of its websites for women’s athletics;
- UPenn will rescind any guidance which violated Title IX, remove or revise any internal and public-facing statements or documents that are inconsistent with Title IX, and notify all staff and women’s athletics of all such rescissions; and
- UPenn will send a personalized letter of apology to each impacted female swimmer.
In other words, University of Pennsylvania renounces (in a carefully delimited, bureaucratically nitpicking fashion) the madness of gender ideology, and recognizes that men are men and women and women. The Trump administration Education Department has achieved a valuable victory in the war to restore sanity to America.
The victory is limited: the University of Pennsylvania, as the education establishment everywhere, is only engaged in Clockwork-Orange reform, doing good under duress. The statement by the University of Pennsylvania’s President makes clear that they are complying with the federal government because they must, not because they wish to: “we must comply with federal requirements, including executive orders.” Presumably should a federal administration with different priorities take office, the University of Pennsylvania will reverse its concessions in an instant.
Then too, the California Department of Education just “formally rejected a federal demand to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.” The University of Pennsylvania’s capitulation clearly will not lead every gender ideologue to surrender at once. The fanatics still must be defeated in scores of public and private bureaucracies.
Yet this resolution agreement matters. What the University of Pennsylvania has agreed to will become a model for every college in the country—and, we hope, once the opposition of Education Departments such as California’s has been vanquished, every K-12 school as well. The Trump administration now has until January 2029 to make this agreement into established practice around the country. Perseverance and elbow-grease will do a great deal to give precedent to sanity.
Far more needs to be done. “Gender ideology” and “gender expression” need to be rooted out from all of higher education. Of course these ideologies require abrogation of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But it is not just a question of liberty, important as liberty is. Gender ideology requires students, requires all of us, to affirm a falsehood: that no immutable sex exists, that there is nothing but “gender,” which can be changed by individual fiat. It is George Orwell’s 1984 as simple fact rather than speculative fiction: If the Party says two plus two equals five, then you must believe that it is so.
Universities should not teach students that a university is where you go to learn how to lie. They should not indulge students who wish to lie to themselves. The point of a university is to teach students to seek out the truth—civilly, but fearlessly. “Gender expression rights” require students to lie about the most basic fact of human nature, the existence of men and women. Once they have been taught to accept a lie so vast, to accept the humiliation of affirming the self-evidently false, they will be accustomed to a hundred smaller lies. “Gender expression rights” convert universities into a machine that destroys students’ character, as it habituates them to the routine of lies.
The University of Pennsylvania’s resolution agreement is only the beginning of the necessary campaign to undo the edifice of lies labeled as “gender identity” and “gender expression.” California’s declaration of die-hard resistance tells us that this campaign necessarily will be slow and hard fought. We welcome this resolution agreement enthusiastically—but a great deal more remains to be done.
Photo by Smallbones - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11940230
