Wagner Faculty, a small, non-public liberal arts school 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 Schooling Division introduced on Friday.
The division’s Workplace for Civil Rights (OCR) launched an investigation into Wagner after USA Fencing officers disqualified a lady from a event on the College of Maryland on March 30. Stephanie Turner, 31, had refused to compete in opposition to Pink 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 rapidly went viral, amplified by conservative activists, political figures and Fox Information.
“This is heroic on her part,” Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote in a publish on X, responding to a video of the alternate posted by Riley Gaines, a frequent critic of transgender ladies in ladies’s sports activities.
In Could, 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, shouldn’t be restricted to school college students, in response to the college’s fencing membership, 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 school’s ladies’s fencing workforce till February, when the NCAA mentioned it will adjust to President Trump’s government order to ban transgender student-athletes from ladies’ and girls’s sports activities.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in April, Sullivan mentioned the alternate with Turner left her bewildered. “Nothing close to this has ever happened. No one has ever had a problem with me fencing in a women’s event,” mentioned Sullivan, who grew to become medically eligible for girls’s tournaments final yr.
USA Fencing, the game’s governing physique, introduced in July that it will amend its transgender and nonbinary participation coverage to align with a brand new U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee coverage barring transgender ladies 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 mirror “biology-based” definitions of the phrases “male” and “female,” in line with an government order Trump signed on his first day again in workplace proclaiming that the U.S. acknowledges solely two unchangeable sexes.
The school may even subject a public assertion pledging to adjust to Title IX, the federal civil rights regulation in opposition to intercourse discrimination in colleges that the Trump administration has mentioned prohibits transgender college students from competing in ladies’ and girls’s sports activities.
The College of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater, agreed to a virtually an identical decision in July.
In a press release on Friday, Wagner Faculty President Jeffrey Doggett mentioned the college 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 college permitting transgender ladies to compete.
The school’s settlement with the administration, Doggett mentioned, is “markedly different” from these of different universities discovered to have violated Trump’s orders.
“Working cooperatively with the OCR investigators, we were able to negotiate terms that are limited, minimally intrusive and tailored to the particular facts of Wagner’s situation,” he mentioned.
Doggett added that the school had been following NCAA and USA Fencing guidelines relevant on the time when it allowed Sullivan, whom the assertion doesn’t title immediately, to take part on the ladies’s fencing workforce. The settlement with OCR “makes clear that there was no admission or finding of any wrongdoing by the College,” he mentioned.
“As we know, higher education is in the midst of great change,” Doggett continued. “Like many institutions, Wagner College is doing what it must to advance its mission during this period of turbulence. I believe that it is of the utmost importance that Wagner set a course that ensures its long-term success, and part of that is to continue to foster an open and supportive community that follows the laws and regulations with which it must comply. In bringing an end to this investigation I believe we can continue to do both.”
