• The University of Pennsylvania will ban transgender women from its women's sports teams.
• As part of the agreement, titles and records will be restored to female athletes previously affected by Lia Thomas’s participation.
• Education Secretary Linda McMahon heralded the deal as a victory for women's rights in sports.
• The settlement follows a federal investigation into Title IX violations associated with Thomas's competition.
• The agreement includes provisions for public acknowledgment and gender definition compliance in athletics.

The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to ban transgender women from participating in its women’s sports teams as part of a resolution to a federal civil rights investigation regarding swimmer Lia Thomas. The U.S. Department of Education announced this agreement, stating that UPenn had violated Title IX by permitting Thomas to compete on the women’s swim team during the 2021-2022 season, when she became the first openly transgender athlete to win a Division I championship. This resolution comes amid the Trump administration's efforts to prohibit transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports, according to HuffPost, The Hill, and Newsweek.

As part of the settlement, Penn will restore individual Division I swimming records and titles to female athletes who were previously disadvantaged by Thomas’s victories and send personalized apology letters to them. This move was further elaborated in official statements which indicated that school records would be updated to reflect which female athletes would now hold titles under current eligibility guidelines, according to ABC News and Reuters.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon emphasized the agreement as a “great victory for women and girls not only at the University of Pennsylvania but across our nation.” The university must also adopt “biology-based” definitions of male and female and publicly declare its commitment to excluding male athletes from female sports, which reflects a broader trend in regulatory policies around transgender participation in sports driven by the Trump administration, as reported by BBC and NPR.

The resolution stems from a two-month investigation initiated by the Education Department earlier this year, culminating in a determination that Penn's policies under Thomas's tenure led to a violation of Title IX. The investigation drew attention to the competing interests between transgender rights and the protection of women's sports, an aspect highlighted by various stakeholders in this ongoing debate, according to Dawn and Newsweek.