NCAA bans men from women’s sports after Trump order

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) last week reversed its policy allowing men in women’s sports after President Donald Trump’s executive order.

Trump’s order

The order made it official US policy to oppose the competitive participation of males in women’s sports and prohibits federal funding to any educational program that allows it.

“In recent years, many educational institutions and athletic associations have allowed men to compete in women’s sports,” the EO read. “This is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”

“Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” the order continued. “It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”

NCAA: ‘Trump's order provides a clear, national standard’

On Thursday, the NCAA announced a new policy that prohibits a “student-athlete assigned male at birth” from competing on a women’s team. 

"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.”

The policy change was cheered by female athletes concerned about the lack of safety and unfair competition they endured when forced to play against men claiming to be women. 

“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. Thank God Trump is back in office,” said Riley Gaines, who together with other female athletes sued the NCAA over its refusal to ban men from women’s sports. In 2022, Gaines famously lost her swimming match at the University of Kentucky to Lia Thomas, a man who pretended to be female.

What do women want?

But while women’s sports activists like Harry Potter author JK Rowling blame men for placing female athletes at risk, the policies that allowed that practice have been enforced mostly by women. Seven out of nine members of the NCAA’s Inclusion Office, for example, are female. Most articles advocating for men in women’s sports are written by women, including a New York Times piece in December written by Juliet Macur who referred to actual women as “non-transgender women.”

Surveys of women in Western countries have found that the majority of female athletes support men competing against women and do not believe males hold an “unfair advantage” against females. Most men strongly disagree.

A study published last year found that 81% of female athletes think governing bodies should be trying harder to include people who identify as transgender, and 66% believe transgender athletes are treated unfairly in sports.

According to a 2022 Pew Research poll, 62% of women feel “there is a great deal or a fair amount of discrimination against transgender people.” Only 52% of men agree. Women have also been more likely than men to say it is “extremely or very important” to use a person’s “new” name or “preferred pronouns.”

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