The U.S. Department of Education confirmed Tuesday that the Trump administration is looking into a Connecticut school system that is at the center of a legal battle over permitting transgender student athletes to play competitive girls’ sports. This development adds another hot spot in the national discussion surrounding trans girls’ involvement in youth sports.
If the department finds that the town’s school system violates Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational programs or activities that receive federal assistance, Cromwell Mayor James Demetriades said the school system could lose almost $1 million in federal special education funding.
The Democrat mayor declared on Monday that if the school system did not permit student athletes to participate in sex-segregated sports teams that aligned with their gender identification, they would not be permitted to compete in the state’s athletic conference.
“All applicable state and federal law as well as the rules for the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference,” which is the state’s regulatory body for secondary school athletics, are now being followed by the district, he said. Cromwell now has “no gender diverse” high school CIAC athletes, according to Demetriades, who made this claim in an interview on Tuesday.
“The reason Cromwell was singled out for this action is unknown to us,” Demetriades wrote in a Facebook statement. According to him, the use of the restrooms and locker rooms is also being investigated.
In 2020, four runners contested CIAC’s regulation permitting transgender girls to participate in high school athletics, claiming they were unjustly compelled to compete against transgender sprinters from Cromwell and Bloomfield. CIAC contended that its policy is intended to adhere to a state statute that mandates that all high school pupils be treated in accordance with their gender identity. Additionally, it has stated that the policy complies with Title IX.
The lawsuit was resurrected in 2023 and is still active, despite the fact that a federal appeals court dismissed the plaintiffs’ challenge to CIAC’s policy in 2022, stating that they lacked standing and had not been denied a “chance to be champions.” In 2026, it might be prepared for trial.
The inquiry was examining whether Cromwell’s regulations were “denying girls and young women equal athletic opportunities,” according to a statement from Craig Trainor, head of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
“This Administration will fight on every front to protect women’s and girls’ sports,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
Cromwell, which has a population of about 14,000, is located roughly 20 minutes south of Hartford, the capitol. Cromwell High School was to host a demonstration on Tuesday night to support transgender students.
The Office for Civil Rights began looking into Connecticut’s policy permitting transgender high school athletes to compete as the gender they identify with in 2019, during the first term of President Donald Trump. It concluded that “the loss of athletic benefits and opportunities for female student-athletes” was the outcome of the CIAC’s, Cromwell’s, and many other Connecticut cities’ actions.
Trump signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” a few days after he took office for a second term. The order declares that all investments made in educational programs “that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” will be canceled.
In his post, Demetriades urged state representatives to step in and protect the town from liabilities in the event that the Department of Justice files a lawsuit against Cromwell.
The largest school system in Oregon, Portland Public Schools, was the subject of an investigation by the Department of Education in March for permitting a transgender athlete to participate in high school girls’ track and field.
