An investigation by the U.S. Department of Education has found that California violated Title IX by allowing transgender athletes to compete against biological females, officials said Wednesday.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 requires schools to guarantee equal opportunities for girls in sports and other school activities.
“Although Governor Gavin Newsom admitted months ago it was ‘deeply unfair’ to allow men to compete in women’s sports, both the California Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation continued as recently as a few weeks ago to allow men to steal female athletes’ well-deserved accolades and to subject them to the indignity of unfair and unsafe competitions,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.
“The Trump administration will relentlessly enforce Title IX protections for women and girls, and our findings today make clear that California has failed to adhere to its obligations under federal law. The state must swiftly come into compliance with Title IX or face the consequences that follow,” McMahon said.
Izzy Gardon, director of communications for Newsom, said in a statement, “It wouldn’t be a day ending in ‘Y’ without the Trump administration threatening to defund California. Now Secretary McMahon is confusing government with her WrestleMania days — dramatic, fake, and completely divorced from reality. This won’t stick.”
The governor’s office also noted that California is one of 22 states that have laws requiring transgender students to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity. California Assembly Bill 1266 was enacted in 2013 during Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.
State officials added that only about 10 transgender athletes compete among 510,000 NCAA student-athletes, and in California’s 5.8 million-student K-12 public schools, the number of active transgender student-athletes is estimated to be in the single digits.
Scott Roark, a spokesman for the California Department of Education, said in a statement, “The California Department of Education believes all students should have the opportunity to learn and play at school, and we have consistently applied existing law in support of students’ rights to do so.”
A spokeswoman for CIF said the organization, a nonprofit not affiliated with the state government, does not comment on legal matters.
The federal Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has issued a proposed Resolution Agreement to the California Department of Education and CIF to resolve the Title IX violations. The proposal offers both entities a chance to voluntarily agree to change their practices within 10 days or risk imminent enforcement action, including referral to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The governor’s office described the federal Education Department’s “letter and proposed resolution agreement … (as) not a serious legal document — it’s a political document designed to intimidate school officials and unlawfully override well-established state laws protecting students.”
The department planned to notify all recipients of federal funding with interscholastic athletic programs in California that to comply with Title IX, recipients must adopt biology-based definitions of the words “male” and “female.”
Federal officials also will require funding recipients to “restore to female athletes all individual records, titles, and awards misappropriated by male athletes competing in female competitions” and to “send a personalized letter apologizing on behalf of the state of California for allowing her educational experience to be marred by sex discrimination.”
According to Newsom’s office the proposed agreement would require “school officials to go back more than a decade through athletic records to strip medals, titles, and honors from trans girls and retroactively reassign them to cisgender girls even if the students are no longer enrolled.”
State officials also warned the agreement would compel schools to “certify girlhood” by confirming each year that no trans athletes are participating in girls sports, “then essentially doxing children by posting this information publicly online.”
A mandated procedure to verify the sex of all athletes — “using ‘long-standing school records,’ a euphemism that could include birth certificates or other invasive documentation procedures” — would turn teachers and administrators into “gender-cops,” Newsom’s office cautioned.
In February after President Donald Trump signed the Protecting Women’s Sports Executive Order, the CIF announced it would abide by state law, which allows athletes to participate on teams based on an individual’s gender identity rather than their biological sex.
In May, AB Hernandez, a transgender student-athlete for Jurupa Valley High School in Riverside County, won first place in the girls high jump and triple jump at the state championship in Clovis.
Updated June 26, 2025, 9:03 a.m.
