The University of Southern California is now turning male students away from a section of its campus gym during designated hours, a policy that reserves the space exclusively for female and non-binary students and that the university's own student advocacy group spent months pushing into existence.
The restriction applies to the Robinson Room at the Lyon Center, USC's main fitness facility. Men are barred from the room on Mondays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. during a trial period running from April 6 to May 15, the Daily Mail reported. The idea was driven by the Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment, known as SAGE, and approved by the Lyon Center.
The policy sits uneasily next to the university's own stated rules. USC's facility-use policy says all students and faculty may use gym resources regardless of race or gender. Yet the Robinson Room restriction explicitly excludes one group, men, on the basis of gender alone.
Jana Alnajjar, a sophomore who serves as SAGE's advocacy liaison, told USC's student newspaper, the Daily Trojan, that she pursued the reserved space after hearing complaints from female and non-binary students about their experiences in the weight room. She said multiple students told her they were regularly approached or "looked up and down" by male peers.
Alnajjar described discomfort that, in her telling, carries a real cost:
"Over time, that discomfort leads them to stop trying to go to the gym altogether."
Mengze Wu, a senior studying neuroscience, offered a similar account. She told the paper she often tries to work out near other women to feel more at ease.
"My past experiences with being in enclosed spaces where it's very men-dominated has never been super pleasant."
The feelings are real enough. But feelings are not a legal framework, and a public-facing university policy that bars students from a shared facility based on sex raises questions that go well beyond personal comfort, questions about equal access, Title IX obligations, and the limits of identity-group carve-outs on campuses funded in part by federal dollars.
Alnajjar said the trial run did not happen overnight. Getting the restricted hours approved took months of planning and negotiations with the Lyon Center. She also noted that federal restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs hampered her initial proposals.
That detail is worth pausing on. The federal government has been tightening scrutiny of DEI-driven policies at universities. Alnajjar's own account suggests those restrictions forced her group to rework its pitch, yet the end result is a policy that separates students by gender in a shared campus space.
The restricted area will not take up the entire Robinson Room gym floor, and the window is narrow: two hours a week, spread across two days. Alnajjar said she hopes 20 to 40 students will use the space during the trial. If turnout meets that threshold, SAGE plans to lobby for more space and longer hours.
In other words, the pilot is designed to justify expansion. That is not a neutral experiment. It is a campaign with a built-in escalation plan.
SAGE describes itself on its website as a "queer and trans inclusive organization" that programs events to address "emerging gender related concerns of students, faculty, and staff." Its mission statement goes further: "SAGE seeks to uplift all voices oppressed by the patriarchy in dynamic, critical ways." That language tells you where the group sits on the ideological spectrum and what kind of institutional culture produced this policy.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. California's university system has become a recurring flashpoint in broader debates over campus ideology, from curriculum controversies to administrative overreach. USC's gym policy is a small-bore example of a much larger pattern: institutions carving out separate rules for separate identity groups, then daring anyone to object.
The gym restriction also arrives against a revealing backdrop. In October 2025, USC became one of nine colleges that received President Donald Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence." The proposal aimed to provide preferential funding opportunities to universities that comply with certain administration requests, including banning race or gender considerations in admissions, limiting international student enrollment, and enforcing zero tolerance for viewpoint discrimination against conservatives.
USC's interim president, Beong-Soo Kim, wrote to the administration on October 16 to decline. His objection was framed around academic freedom:
"We are concerned that even though the Compact would be voluntary, tying research benefits to it would, over time, undermine the same values of free inquiry and academic excellence that the Compact seeks to promote."
The majority of the nine universities declined the compact. None signed it, though some showed openness to incorporating the administration's ideas. None of the recipients have been directly punished for refusing, though some did suffer federal funding freezes for other reasons.
Brown University, for instance, restored $510 million in frozen funding in July 2025 after reaching a deal with the federal government. The University of Pennsylvania got $175 million in grants back after committing to restrict transgender females from women's sports.
USC, meanwhile, rejected a compact that asked it to stop using gender as a factor in admissions, and then turned around and used gender as a factor in gym access. The contradiction is hard to miss. When the federal government asks USC to treat students equally regardless of gender, the university cites academic freedom. When a campus advocacy group asks USC to separate students by gender, the university says yes.
The Daily Mail approached USC's administration for further comment. The fact pack does not indicate whether the university responded. That silence is itself notable. A policy that bars an entire class of students from a shared facility, even for a limited window, would seem to warrant a public explanation from the institution, not just from a sophomore advocacy liaison.
Several questions remain unanswered. Who, specifically, in the Lyon Center's leadership signed off on the arrangement? Does the university's general counsel believe the policy is consistent with Title IX and USC's own nondiscrimination commitments? What enforcement mechanism keeps men out of the Robinson Room during restricted hours? And if the trial "succeeds" by SAGE's own metrics, what limits, if any, would the university place on further gender-segregated programming?
These are not hypothetical concerns. Schools at every level have faced legal challenges when administrators restrict student access based on identity categories, and courts have not always been sympathetic to the institutions.
Two hours a week in one room at one gym. That is the scope of the restriction right now. Defenders will say it is modest, temporary, and well-intentioned. And maybe it is all three.
But policy precedents do not stay modest. Alnajjar herself said the goal is to expand the hours and the space if enough students show up. The trial is a foot in the door, not a final answer.
The deeper issue is the principle. A university that tells male students they cannot enter a room they help pay for, solely because they are male, has adopted a framework in which equal treatment is negotiable. That framework does not stop at the gym door. It spreads into hiring, admissions, housing, and every other domain where identity-group preferences can be dressed up as safety or comfort.
American students already struggle with basic civics. They deserve institutions that model equal treatment under clear rules, not institutions that teach them the rules bend depending on which group is asking.
USC charges some of the highest tuition in the country. California's political leadership has shown little appetite for reining in campus ideology. And the federal compact that might have nudged the university toward neutrality was rejected by its own president.
So the men of USC will wait outside the Robinson Room on Monday and Wednesday mornings, excluded from a facility their tuition funds, while the university that rejected gender-blind admissions standards experiments with gender-based exclusion in the weight room. The contradiction speaks for itself.
