February 7, 2025
NCAA Reverses 15-Year Transgender Policy Limiting Women’s Competitions To Only Females Assigned At Birth
Another one bites the dust....
After 15 years, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) changed the participation policy for transgender athletes, placing a limit on competitive women’s sports to athletes assigned female at birth only, CNN reports.
The change was handed down on Feb. 6, just one day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports, while a group of young girls surrounded him. The order permits federal agencies to withhold federal funding from entities if they don’t abide by Title IX, a law signed by former President Richard Nixon in 1972 prohibiting sex discrimination in education programs with federal funding.
With the new Trump administration’s interpretation of “sex” correlating to the gender someone was assigned at birth, the NCAA rule is effective immediately. It applies to all athletes who overstep past eligibility reviews. NCAA President Charlie Baker said Trump’s policy lays out a “clear” standard for the organization, representing close to 1,100 member schools with more than 500,000 athletes, making it the nation’s largest governing body for college athletics. “We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” Baker said.
“To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
The NCAA once supported trans athletics, adapting the policy in 2022 with a sport-by-sport approach, opening up the participation of transgender athletes determined by the policy of the sport’s national governing body, according to the Associated Press. However, over the years, trans athletes have been the target of ridicule. Critics often push the narrative that participation in women’s sports is unfair in addition to an alleged safety risk. Trump grabbed onto that narrative during his 2024 presidential campaign, regardless of the minimal amount of transgender athletes.
In 2024, Baker claimed only to know 10 transgender athletes in the NCAA.
Former Kentucky swimmer and vocal advocate of a transgender athlete ban from women’s sports, Riley Gaine, celebrated the order on X. She was also present for the signing as the girls stood next to the criminally indicted businessman. “The NCAA has officially changed their ‘transgender participation’ policy immediately. I can’t even begin to tell you how vindicating it feels knowing no girl will ever have to experience what my teammates and I did,” she wrote.
“Thank God Trump is back in office.”
The new policy is similar to one held by the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), a smaller governing agency of only 241 small colleges in the U.S. In April 2024, the association voted unanimously to approve a policy that permitted only athletes whose sex assigned at birth is female and who haven’t started hormone therapy to compete.
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