Roanoke College discriminated against members of its women’s swim team by allowing a transgender student to participate and then retaliating against athletes who raised concerns, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares announced Monday.
A lengthy investigation by the attorney general’s Office of Civil Rights found that the college’s actions violated the Virginia Human Rights Act along with Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in schools, Miyares said at a brief press conference in Salem.
No one from the private college in Salem attended the conference, but Monday afternoon, the school released a lengthy statement roundly denying the allegations. The statement also called for transparency from the attorney general’s office.
Miyares’ office sent members of the media an invitation to the news conference late Friday afternoon but did not reveal its subject until Monday morning when the event began.
“This finding is grounded on law, the demonstrated athletic advantage of male puberty, and also on common sense,” Miyares said at the press conference.
He did not announce any sanctions that the college would face and said discussions were ongoing regarding next steps.
“The Virginia Human Rights Act affords the parties multiple options after a finding of reasonable cause, including resolution by conciliation,” a spokesperson from the attorney general’s office said Monday. “This Office cannot comment further on that process.” Conciliation is a voluntary negotiation process facilitated by a neutral third party.
The findings of the investigation had been released by a member of the swim team, according to a press release from the attorney general’s office. The report, which Miyares’ office did not share Monday, has been uploaded to the website of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, an advocacy group that opposes transgender athletes playing on women’s teams.
“The college categorically denies the unsubstantiated allegation that its trustees, faculty, staff, coaches, or administration violated the human rights of any students or retaliated against them in any way,” Roanoke College said in its statement.
A transgender swimmer asked to join the Roanoke College women’s swim team in fall 2023 from the men’s team after taking a year off for their transition, as required by National Collegiate Athletic Association rules that were in place at the time.
Several swimmers from the women’s team expressed concerns to the college about competing against someone who had been born male before taking their concerns public in an October 2023 press conference.
By that point, the swimmer in question had withdrawn from the team. There are no out transgender athletes on the college’s teams at this time, a spokesperson said Monday.
The complaints filed by swim team members with the attorney general’s office in January and February 2024 described harassment the women said they endured upon speaking publicly and claimed that the college didn’t do enough to protect them from the backlash. The complaints also claimed that the college retaliated against the swimmers by not accepting them to May 2024 study-abroad courses run by the college that they applied for shortly before the October 2023 press conference.
Roanoke College, in its statement Monday, denied the allegations of retaliation against the students who applied to study abroad.
The college statement said it had cooperated with the investigation and would continue to do so. It also appeared to call for greater transparency from the attorney general’s office.
“From the beginning, we have been committed to full transparency and to fulfilling our almost 200-year Lutheran history of serving students,” the college’s statement said. “We expect the Attorney General to be similarly motivated and thus anticipate that any ongoing process will correct errors of fact and law reflected in the report.”
“It’s not about partisan ideologies. This is about fairness,” Miyares, a Republican who is up for reelection this fall, said during the press conference, which was held at the Salem library and livestreamed on Facebook.
He claimed that Roanoke College had failed the members of the women’s swim team by not caring about their well-being when they were harassed after speaking out.
Miyares later added that “left-wing ideologies that forces men to compete in sports” violate Title IX, and that Roanoke College was “wrong to allow a biological male to join the women’s swim team.”
The college didn’t have a policy for transgender student-athletes before the controversy. In October 2023, its board of trustees adopted guidelines that were more strict than those set by the NCAA at the time, choosing to defer to the governing body of each sport, the college’s statement said.
Under the guidelines of USA Swimming, the student would have been ineligible if she hadn’t withdrawn her request to swim on the women’s team.
Miyares was joined at the press conference by William Bock, a sports attorney representing the members of the swim team, and Cady Mullens, mother of former Roanoke swim captain Lily Mullens.
“My teammates and I faced anxiety, sleepless nights and a sense of defeat and abandonment, knowing that biology had stacked the odds against us,” Mullens read from a statement on behalf of her daughter, who she said had work obligations.
In March 2024, six swimmers from the Roanoke team joined a federal class-action lawsuit against the NCAA that alleged civil rights violations against female athletes.
Several members of the team made an appearance on stage with President Donald Trump during a campaign stop in Salem in November 2024, a few days before he was elected to a second term.
“Miyares’ finding treats the transgender woman athlete, who resigned from the Roanoke College women’s swim team more than two years ago, as the kind of political pawn that the Trump campaign used to foment anti-transgender sentiment as an election issue,” Carl Charles, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal, said in a statement Monday. Lambda Legal is a national legal organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ civil rights.
“This determination is not a court decision from any federal district court in Virginia or even from any Virginia state court and thus cannot single handedly manipulate existing law to its biased end,” Charles said.
Roanoke College is a Division III NCAA school. It does not offer athletic scholarships to students.
The NCAA updated its regulations in June to limit competition in women’s sports to athletes assigned female at birth. The association still allows transgender students to practice with women’s teams. The move followed a February executive order from the Trump administration to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports in educational environments.
The association’s president has said in a congressional hearing that fewer than 10 of the NCAA’s 500,000-plus student athletes are transgender. In July, Miyares and attorneys general from 27 other states called on the NCAA to reinstate records of female athletes that were “stripped away” under policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
The Virginia High School League also updated its rules this spring to prohibit students assigned male at birth from playing on girls’ sports teams. That change was expected to affect only a handful of students, according to reporting by Virginia Public Media.