On Jan. 28, the Trump administration’s Department of Education Office for Civil Rights found that San José State University violated Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments when it allowed a transgender athlete to compete in women’s sports.

Further, the Department of Education made several demands, including that the university adopt biology-based definitions of the words “male” and “female” and apologize to each “female” athlete for the alleged discrimination.

Religious ideas about sex and gender should not override scientific consensus in any governmental organization and especially not on a university campus. The Department of Education’s position, while in line with goals set by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, prioritizes a trending religious and conservative argument that overrides truth. It makes a bad-faith argument that students are not capable of assessing their own gender.

Allowing the Trump administration to decide who is “woman enough” to compete does not protect women; it only makes their existence more scrutinized.

San José State University, where we teach, has an opportunity to push back against inaccurate and problematic definitions of womanhood. We urge that it do so.

While reviewing the decision, the university administration has stated that it remains committed to the campus’s role as a “place of learning, respect and opportunity for all.”

But, when placed in a similar situation last year, the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution with a massive endowment, caved to the pressure and imposed a ban on transgender athletes.

As social scientists, we know that both biological sex and gender exist on a spectrum. The effort to cram the complexity of human biology into two distinct categories, male and female, is misguided and doomed to fail. We urge the university to not acquiesce to this unjust order and to take action to reject this encroachment and overreach.

In fact, from the earliest moments of women’s participation in modern sports, sporting institutions have struggled to delineate “male” from “female.” Women athletes have been subject to invasive and humiliating physical examination of their genitals, hormone levels and chromosomes. None of these methods have been successful. Women athletes, endocrinologists and geneticists fought to end this sexist practice, which is once again finding support among men who aren’t afraid to abuse their power.

If the Department of Education truly believed that sex- and gender-based discrimination in sports needs to be stopped, it should look at the abundance of evidence that shows that gender-based discrimination still exists, both in opportunity, resources and treatment. The weaponization of Title IX to exclude trans women does not remedy the many disparities for women in sports; instead, it exacerbates them.

For example, Department of Education data from 2023-2024, analyzed by Accelerate Equity, show that 84% of post-secondary institutions fail to provide gender equity in opportunity and treatment in sports.

At San José State University, where women undergraduates outnumber men, there are more male athletes and more scholarships for men students, more than double the recruiting expenditures and upward of $1 million more spent on athletic related student aid for men as compared to women. These funding disparities are worse in states with bans on trans athletes.

Just because people in authority impose a judgment doesn’t mean it is right. This federal regime defunds science, replaces experienced experts with those who demonstrate loyalty and pushes an antiquated agenda over democracy and sustainability. For these reasons, we may not be surprised by the Department of Education’s conclusions, but we, and in this case, the California State University system should resist complying with its edict.

The impacts of this case are both tangible and symbolic. It does no one justice to continue to spread false information and propaganda over evidence. We don’t need the government to tell us the sky is blue; we know it. We also don’t need them to tell us our gender.

We urge the university to not acquiesce to this unjust order, to say no and to take action to reject this encroachment and overreach. Giving in to the demands of bullies only emboldens them.

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Grace Howard is an associate professor of justice studies at San José State University and a Public Voices fellow at The OpEd Project. Megan Thiele Strong is a sociology professor at San José State University and a Public Voices Fellow at the The OpEd Project. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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