The NCAA announced a new policy on Thursday that restricts college women’s sports to those who were “assigned females at birth.”
Republicans have been the most vocal critics of the NCAA for its January 2022 policy that left it to national governing bodies to decide on their eligibility standards and policies, which allowed men to play in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms.
Trump’s Wednesday order finally put an end to this. One day later, the NCAA announced that its Board of Governors had voted to update its participation policy for transgender sportspeople.
The new policy restricts participation in women’s sports to only student-athletes who were assigned female at birth. Student-athletes born male can practice with female teams, and they will receive medical care. The policy takes effect immediately and applies to every student-athlete, regardless of whether they have previously been eligible for the NCAA’s previous transgender participation policies.
Riley Gaines, a former collegiate athlete at the University of Kentucky who is now a women’s sports advocate, wrote X that she felt “gratified” knowing that no girl would ever experience what her teammates and I experienced.
The NCAA also said that if a male who is transitioning into a woman is found competing on a female team, the “team will be subjected to NCAA mixed team legislation and the team won’t be eligible for NCAA Women’s Championships.”
Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” order empowers federal agencies following Trump’s previous EO, which ordered that the federal government define sex by male or female.
“I think it’s been supported from the beginning of time. And it’s unbelievable, isn’t it, that we had to have a signing ceremony, a press conference about a man and a woman. But that’s where our country had gone under the Biden administration. Now we’ve got it back on track,” Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, said earlier on Thursday.