The Nationwide Collegiate Athletic Affiliation stated Thursday it was banning transgender athletes from girls’s sports activities to adjust to a latest govt order from President Trump.
The “policy change,” efficient instantly, restricts girls’s sports activities to solely these athletes whose delivery gender was feminine. There’s at the moment no correlating restriction for males’s sports activities, supplied these gamers meet all different NCAA eligibility necessities.
Athletes affected by the ban will nonetheless be allowed to apply with groups.
Trump’s govt order permits the Division of Schooling to withhold federal funding from colleges that violate the administration’s interpretation of Title IX as defining “sex” because the somebody’s delivery gender. Such selections have been beforehand made on a sport-by-sport foundation.
“The war on women’s sports is over,” Trump declared Wednesday when signing the order. “We are putting every school on notice: If you let men take over sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated … and risk losing your federal funding.”
In saying the coverage change Thursday, the NCAA stated Trump’s govt order “provides a clear, national standard.”
“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,” NCAA President Charlie Baker stated in a press release.
Baker testified to Congress in December that the NCAA wanted authorized readability across the problem of transgender athletes, whereas additionally estimating there have been fewer than 10 trans athletes among the many 530,000 competing at roughly 1,100 member colleges.
“You have federal judges ruling on individual cases. You have states, 26, 27 states with one set of rules, a whole bunch of states with other sets of rules,” Baker advised reporters on the time. “I do think we would welcome some clarity somewhere on this, so that everybody has a general understanding about what the rules of the game are.”
The NCAA was sued final 12 months by a number of former student-athletes for permitting transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete on the nationwide championships in 2022.
The group’s determination follows an analogous ban on transgender athletes from the LPGA in December.
Initially Printed: February 6, 2025 at 7:16 PM EST
