Wagner School, a small, non-public liberal arts faculty in Staten Island, N.Y., has agreed to adjust to the Trump administration’s restrictions on transgender student-athletes following a federal investigation that stemmed from an incident at a ladies’s fencing competitors in March, the Training Division introduced on Friday.
The division’s Workplace for Civil Rights (OCR) launched an investigation into Wagner after USA Fencing officers disqualified a girl from a event on the College of Maryland on March 30. Stephanie Turner, 31, had refused to compete in opposition to Purple Sullivan, a 19-year-old Wagner pupil, taking a knee to protest Sullivan’s participation in violation of the competitors’s guidelines.
A video of Turner’s disqualification shortly went viral, amplified by conservative activists, political figures and Fox News.
“That is heroic on her half,” Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote in a post on X, responding to a video of the change posted by Riley Gaines, a frequent critic of transgender ladies in ladies’s sports activities.
In Might, the Home Subcommittee on Delivering on Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) held a listening to on the incident and invited Turner to testify.
Participation within the College of Maryland’s Cherry Blossom Open, hosted yearly throughout springtime, is just not restricted to varsity college students, according to the school’s fencing club, of which Turner, who now lives in suburban Philadelphia, is a former member.
Sullivan, a sophomore at Wagner, entered the competitors individually. She had competed for the faculty’s ladies’s fencing crew till February, when the NCAA said it would comply with President Trump’s executive order to ban transgender student-athletes from ladies’ and ladies’s sports activities.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in April, Sullivan stated the change with Turner left her bewildered. “Nothing near this has ever occurred. Nobody has ever had an issue with me fencing in a ladies’s occasion,” stated Sullivan, who turned medically eligible for girls’s tournaments final 12 months.
USA Fencing, the game’s governing physique, announced in July that it might amend its transgender and nonbinary participation coverage to align with a brand new U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee coverage barring transgender women from competing in Olympic ladies’s sports activities.
As a part of its cope with the Trump administration, Wagner will formally amend its athletic insurance policies to replicate “biology-based” definitions of the phrases “male” and “feminine,” according to an executive order Trump signed on his first day again in workplace proclaiming that the U.S. acknowledges solely two unchangeable sexes.
The school may also subject a public assertion pledging to adjust to Title IX, the federal civil rights regulation in opposition to intercourse discrimination in faculties that the Trump administration has stated prohibits transgender college students from competing in ladies’ and ladies’s sports activities.
The College of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater, agreed to a nearly identical resolution in July.
In a statement on Friday, Wagner School President Jeffrey Doggett stated the varsity would proceed to foster a welcoming and supportive neighborhood, however that it has a duty to adjust to federal legal guidelines as the federal government interprets them. He apologized to any student-athletes who have been negatively impacted by the varsity permitting transgender ladies to compete.
The school’s settlement with the administration, Doggett stated, is “markedly completely different” from these of different universities discovered to have violated Trump’s orders.
“Working cooperatively with the OCR investigators, we have been capable of negotiate phrases which are restricted, minimally intrusive and tailor-made to the actual information of Wagner’s scenario,” he stated.
Doggett added that the faculty had been following NCAA and USA Fencing guidelines relevant on the time when it allowed Sullivan, whom the assertion doesn’t identify instantly, to take part on the ladies’s fencing crew. The settlement with OCR “makes clear that there was no admission or discovering of any wrongdoing by the School,” he stated.
“As we all know, larger schooling is within the midst of nice change,” Doggett continued. “Like many establishments, Wagner School is doing what it should to advance its mission throughout this era of turbulence. I imagine that it’s of the utmost significance that Wagner set a course that ensures its long-term success, and a part of that’s to proceed to foster an open and supportive neighborhood that follows the legal guidelines and rules with which it should comply. In bringing an finish to this investigation I imagine we are able to proceed to do each.”