A Progressive Christian Reading of the Smith College Title IX Investigation
On Sophia Smith's Will, the federal investigation of Smith College, the Hebrew of Genesis 1:27, and the Congregationalist who built the school the agency now wants to discipline
On Monday, May 4, 2026, the United States Department of Education opened a Title IX investigation of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The press release named the trans women in Smith’s dorms “male students professing a female identity.”
Read the press release out loud sometimes. Professing. That is not the verb of administrative law. That is the verb of a heresy trial.
The federal release insisted that the Title IX single-sex exception “applies based on biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity” (U.S. Department of Education, 2026). The release nodded at biology twice and at theology zero times. The structure of the argument, though, is theological all the way through. Two weeks earlier, the same theological structure had stepped out from under the desk and announced itself by name in another corner of the federal building. HUD Secretary Scott Turner stood before cameras on April 23 and said, “God created two sexes: male and female” (HUD, 2026). One agency invoked Genesis by name. The other invoked it by structure. Both were citing the same verse, even when only one of them had the nerve to say so out loud.
I am a 60-year-old queer transgender Lutheran woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I run the audio-visual booth at my country church when I have the energy to make it in. I trained two teenage girls to mix the boards on Sundays so I can roam the building, listening to the sound and watching our YouTube stream on my iPad, hunting down anything that seems “off.” The federal agencies that just announced their version of the gospel mentioned me, in part. They also announced it about every trans student in a dorm at Smith. So let us read the press release the way it deserves to be read: as a piece of theology with statutory letterhead.
The Hebrew did not say what it seemed to say.
Genesis 1:27 in the Hebrew is six words: zakhar uneqevah bara otam. “Male and female he created them.” That is the verse the federal agencies and their coalition have hung the policy on. That is the verse Christian-nationalist preachers are quoting at trans kids and their parents, and at women’s colleges, and at HUD shelters. The reading they want is a fence: God made two boxes, the boxes are exhaustive and mutually exclusive, and Title IX is a federal enforcement mechanism for the boxes.
That is not how Hebrew literary structure works. The phrase is a merism, a figure of speech the Hebrew Bible constantly employs. A merism names the two outer poles of a thing to point at the whole thing. “The heavens and the earth” in Genesis 1:1 is the same device. It does not mean God made the sky and the soil and forgot the ocean. It means God made everything, named by its outer poles. “Male and female” works the same way. It names the outer poles of the human population and leaves room for everything in between (see Earth and Altar, 2023; Christian Century, 2025; Keshet, n.d.).
The categories “between” are not theoretical. They have been visible in every culture that has ever taken a census. Eunuchs in the ancient Near East. Hijra in South Asia. Two-spirit people in many Indigenous nations of North America. Intersex newborns in maternity wards last week, present at a rate that varies by definition but lands somewhere on the order of one in two thousand. The fence reading does not handle them. It cannot handle them. It pretends they are not there.
This is not even a niche scholarly position. The Christian Century published the Merism reading as a cover essay in 2025. The Reform Jewish movement has taught it for decades, citing Rabbi Margaret Wenig’s exegesis (Religious Action Center, 2018). Megan K. DeFranza, who writes from a self-described conservative evangelical position, made the same argument in 2015 in the Eerdmans monograph Sex Difference in Christian Theology (DeFranza, 2015). The merism reading exists across denominations, across academic ranks, across the political spectrum. The federal release skipped over all of it.
Paul saw the verse that the agencies were hiding.
Paul of Tarsus knew the Septuagint translation of Genesis 1:27 by heart. He quoted it on purpose. In Galatians 3:28, written around 50 CE, he embedded an early baptismal formula that the Greek-reading first-century church already knew: “There is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Notice the seam. The first two pairs use the standard Greek negation oude (”neither/nor”). The third pair switches to kai (”and”). It is a quotation. Paul is reaching back into Genesis 1:27 in the Septuagint, arsen kai thelu, “male and female,” and saying that the binary the verse named has been undone in the waters of baptism (see Robertson, n.d.).
I want to dwell on this for a second. The first agency to read Genesis 1:27 as grounds for a hierarchy was the Roman Empire after Constantine, and one of the agencies fighting that reading within the Christian canon was Paul, two and a half centuries earlier. Paul anticipated the move. He cited the verse the imperial reading would later weaponize, and he deliberately undid it at the font. The Backyard Church reader has Galatians 3:28 on the refrigerator. The federal press release does not. Guess which one knows the canon better.
The eunuch in Matthew 19 was already standing there.
The Gospel of Matthew adds a third witness. In chapter 19, after a marriage debate, Jesus tells the disciples there are three kinds of eunuchs: “those who have been so from birth, those whom others have made eunuchs, and those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 19:12, NRSV). The first category is the one I want to sit with. Eunuchs from birth. Some bodies arrive outside the male-female binary the marriage debate assumes, and Jesus names them in front of the disciples without flinching, without offering a corrective, without trying to file them under a category they fit better.
Megan DeFranza calls this the buried option. The medieval and early modern Western tradition spent centuries closing the door Jesus opened in this verse. The early Greek fathers, by contrast, kept the door propped open. Read Matthew 19:12 alongside Genesis 1:27, and the merism reading is not a stretch; it is the only reading that handles all the data. The poles in Genesis. The category between the poles in Matthew. The same Christ in both texts.
Sophia Smith was an Orthodox Congregationalist
Now to Smith College itself. The school that the federal release wants to investigate was endowed by Sophia Smith of Hatfield, Massachusetts, who died in June 1870. Her will, drawn up three months earlier in consultation with her pastor, Reverend John Morton Greene, established the school that opened its doors in 1875 (see Smith College, n.d.; Britannica, n.d.).
Sophia Smith was an Orthodox Congregationalist. She gave $30,000 to Andover Theological Seminary during her lifetime, endowing a chair in theology and homiletics. She turned down marriage. She was deaf from the age of 40. She lived a quiet life in a small farming town. And she wrote, into the third article of her will, this sentence: “I direct that the Holy Scriptures be daily and systematically read and studied in said College, and without giving preference to any sect or denomination, all the education and all the discipline shall be pervaded by the Spirit of Evangelical Christian Religion” (see Wikipedia, 2026).
Read that line twice. “Without giving preference to any sect or denomination.” The founder of the school, the federal agency has now chosen to discipline, wrote non-sectarian inclusivity into her own founding document, in 1870, even as the people who claim her tradition are now using federal agencies to police it. The Department of Education did not read the will. They could have. It is a founding historical document, sitting on the Smith College website behind two clicks.
And the tradition Sophia Smith bequeathed to her college? It became, by direct denominational descent, the United Church of Christ. The UCC General Synod adopted the original Open and Affirming resolution in 1985, and at General Synod XIV in 2003, formally added transgender persons to the declaration of full inclusion (see Open and Affirming Coalition UCC, 2025). As of 2025, 1,743 UCC churches and 8 seminaries hold an Open and Affirming covenant. The UCC General Synod’s 2017 resolution on Transgender Equity and Inclusion is updated and republished every legislative cycle (see United Church of Christ, 2025).
Sophia Smith’s tradition does not say what the press release wants it to say. It has not been said that for forty years.
The Quaker chaplain who saved 5,000 children
There is a side door I want to walk you through. Smith’s first chaplain, appointed in 1935 by President William Allan Neilson, was A. Burns Chalmers. He was a Quaker pacifist. During the Nazi occupation of France, Chalmers became a central figure in the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon network, the Huguenot village in the Cévennes mountains where the pastor André Trocmé and his congregation hid Jewish refugees. Chalmers helped move and shelter approximately 5,000 Jews, most of them children, away from the cattle cars (see Smith College Center for Religious and Spiritual Life, 2010).
That was the first religious figure Smith College put on the payroll. A Quaker who would not stop hiding Jewish children from a fascist state. Eighty years later, the same college’s Quaker-and-Congregationalist inheritance is being told by a federal agency that admitting trans women into the dorm is the part of its tradition the agency cannot abide. Friends General Conference, the umbrella body for hundreds of North American Quaker meetings, signed the December 2024 interfaith statement on transgender support, the same statement signed by the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Reform Jewish movement, the Reconstructing Judaism movement, the Metropolitan Community Churches, and a dozen more (see Unitarian Universalist Association, 2024).
The agencies pretending to speak for “the faith” at this moment speak for one wing of one branch of one tradition. The descendants of the actual founders of the schools they are policing have already taken the floor and voted the other way.
And the law does not even reach what they say it reaches
One last thing. There is a clean little legal problem at the bottom of all this that the press release seems to hope no one notices. Title IX’s admissions provisions, codified at 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a)(1), apply only to vocational programs, professional programs, graduate programs, and public undergraduate institutions. Smith College is private. Title IX’s admissions nondiscrimination provisions do not cover its undergraduate admissions. The single-sex exception in subsection (a)(5) is the carve-out that a public undergraduate college needs to keep a single-sex admissions policy. A private college does not need that exception, since the admissions provisions never reached it in the first place.
The press release’s claim that the exception “applies based on biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity” is aimed at a wall the building never had, which is why the actual investigation is reaching for dorms and bathrooms and locker rooms, programs that the general nondiscrimination clause does cover. To get to the trans student in the dorm, the agency has to argue that admitting her is a form of sex discrimination against the cisgender student down the hall. That theory has to confront the Supreme Court’s 2020 holding in Bostock v. Clayton County, which already said that firing a person for being transgender is sex discrimination. The Trump administration has been trying for two years to keep Bostock from extending to education law, and the press release’s theological language is doing the work the statute will not.
What I want the church to see
I am writing this for the readers I share a pew with, and the readers I would share a pew with if their congregations were the kind that lets people like me up to the soundboard. The federal agencies behind this press release are claiming to defend an inheritance that is not theirs to defend. Sophia Smith’s will. Joseph W. Taylor’s Quaker bequest to Bryn Mawr. A. Burns Chalmers’s ministry in occupied France. The 1985 Open and Affirming resolution. Galatians 3:28. The eunuch in Matthew 19. The Hebrew of Genesis 1:27 and the centuries of rabbinic and Christian commentary that read it as merism rather than fence.
If you are a progressive Christian, an exvangelical, a recovering Catholic, or a Lutheran trying not to shake your head from the pew, the press release is asking you to believe that the binary reading of Genesis 1:27 is the reading. It is not. The reading was constructed over centuries, hardened in the post-Constantinian alliance of church and empire, and is now being deployed by a cabinet agency to discipline a women’s college that admits trans women. The Hebrew does not require the reading. Paul did not believe the reading. Jesus contradicted the reading inside the canonical gospel of Matthew. Sophia Smith did not endow her school for reading.
And the trans alumna of Smith, the trans first-year in the dorm tonight, the trans 14-year-old at her Lutheran confirmation in some other small town next May, all of them have been written into the same lineage by the same imago Dei. The agency does not get to write them out in press releases, no matter how many federal seals and scriptural footnotes the document wears.
Sophia Smith wrote a will. The federal government did not read it. We can.
Author Note: Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She corrects all her papers and articles with Grammarly, because even though she has deep thoughts, she has shallow patience for punctuation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.