The Smith College community and national trans rights organizations say the U.S. Department of Education’s Title IX investigation into the women’s liberal arts college in western Massachusetts signals the Trump administration’s new line of attack on higher education and transgender rights.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced on May 4 that it opened an investigation into Smith College for “admitting biological men [transgender women] and granting them access to women-only spaces.” Smith began admitting transgender women in 2015 after a student-led effort.

The OCR aims to determine whether the college violated Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal funding. The department’s statement claims that Title IX only applies to biological sex, not gender identity, and “an all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”

Andrew Ortiz, senior policy attorney at Transgender Law Center, said that this investigation is unique.

“It’s both in line with the administration’s consistent weaponization of the levers of power within the federal government to go after trans people and to attack higher education—public education generally—using trans people as a scapegoat,” he said. “But it’s also kind of new because the vast majority of the Title IX investigations to this point have primarily focused on sports participation and to some degree access to facilities access, like bathroom access. This is, I believe, the first investigation that’s directly related to admissions.”

Ortiz also said the majority of Title IX investigations until now have been into public institutions.

“Because it’s a private institution, Title IX doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to the admissions decisions of Smith, so it makes this even more odd and confusing,” he said. “Yes, this is a new escalation and a new version of what they’ve been doing, but it’s also part of a larger project to delegitimize and dismantle higher education and public education.”

Read the full article about the Smith College investigation by Sarah Prager at Prism.