The National Collegiate Athletic Association said Thursday it was banning transgender athletes from women’s sports to comply with a recent executive order from President Trump.
The “policy change,” effective immediately, restricts women’s sports to only those athletes whose birth gender was female. There’s currently no correlating restriction for men’s sports, provided those players meet all other NCAA eligibility requirements.
Athletes affected by the ban will still be allowed to practice with teams.
Trump’s executive order allows the Department of Education to withhold federal funding from schools that violate the administration’s interpretation of Title IX as defining “sex” as the someone’s birth gender. Such decisions were previously made on a sport-by-sport basis.
“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 announcing the policy change Thursday, the NCAA said Trump’s executive 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 said in a statement.
Baker testified to Congress in December that the NCAA needed legal clarity around the issue of transgender athletes, while also estimating there were fewer than 10 trans athletes among the 530,000 competing at roughly 1,100 member schools.
“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 told reporters at 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 last year by several former student-athletes for allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete at the national championships in 2022.
The organization’s decision follows a similar ban on transgender athletes from the LPGA in December.
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