The NCAA revised its participation policy for transgender athletes Thursday, a day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that aims to bar trans athletes from women’s sports.
The updated policy, which is effective immediately, limits competition in women’s sports exclusively to athletes assigned female at birth. It permits athletes “assigned male at birth to practice with women’s teams and receive benefits such as medical care while practicing.” The NCAA said its new rules apply to all athletes, including those who had previously undergone eligibility reviews under its previous policy.
“The NCAA is an organization made up of 1,100 colleges and universities in all 50 states that collectively enroll more than 530,000 student-athletes,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a statement. “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. To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
Trump’s executive order directs the Education Department to inform schools they will be violating Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools, if they allow transgender athletes to compete in girls’ or women’s sports. Under the law, schools that discriminate based on sex are not eligible for federal funding.
In response, the Education Department earlier Thursday announced investigations into the University of Pennsylvania, San José State University and a Massachusetts high school athletic association over reported Title IX violations. Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association are targeted for allowing transgender students to play on a women’s swimming team and girls’ high school basketball team, respectively. Several opponents of the San José State women’s volleyball team forfeited games this fall because the Spartans purportedly had a transgender athlete on their roster.
During a congressional hearing in December, Baker said there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of the more than 500,000 competing across the NCAA’s three divisions.
The NCAA last updated its eligibility policy for transgender athletes in January 2022, partly spurred by the success of Lia Thomas, a former Pennsylvania athlete who became the first known transgender swimmer to win a Division I NCAA title. Its 2022 revision was meant to more closely align with each individual sport’s national or international governing body.
Athletes were required to provide documentation of their testosterone levels at different points throughout their season. In most sports, the concentration of testosterone in a transgender athlete’s blood had to be less than 10 nanomoles per litre if they wished to compete with women, though some sports had a lower threshold (in hockey, swimming and diving, and tennis, for instance, the requirement was less than 5 nanomoles per litre).
The NCAA’s decision comes two days after three of Thomas’s former Pennsylvania teammates filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court claiming Harvard, Penn, the Ivy League and the NCAA violated Title IX by allowing Thomas to compete in the 2022 Ivy League swimming championships. They’re seeking damages and the vacating of Thomas’s swimming records. Their lawsuit, for which they are requesting class-action status, follows others filed in the past year that seek to restrict transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.
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