NCAA Policy Change: Men Barred From Women's Sports

 

In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting men from playing women’s sports, the NCAA fell in line on Thursday, announcing a new policy that limits college women’s sports to those “assigned female at birth only.”

The NCAA has been criticized — most acutely and frequently by Republican lawmakers — for adopting a policy in January 2022 that abdicated ruling on men playing in women’s sports by leaving it up to the national governing bodies of each sport to come up with their own eligibility standards, policies that allowed men in women's sports and locker rooms.

It took Trump’s order on Wednesday to put an end to that. The NCAA one day later announced that its Board of Governors voted to update its participation policy for transgender athletes.

“The new policy limits competition in women's sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only. The policy permits student-athletes assigned male at birth to practice with women's teams and receive benefits such as medical care while practicing. This policy is effective immediately and applies to all student-athletes regardless of previous eligibility reviews under the NCAA's prior transgender participation policy,” read the announcement.

“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,” former collegiate swimmer at the University of Kentucky and women's sports activist Riley Gaines said in a post to X.

Further, the NCAA said if a man who is transitioning to a trans woman is caught competing on a women’s team, “the team will be subject to NCAA mixed-team legislation, and the team will no longer be eligible for NCAA women's championships.”

Trump’s order, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports," empowers federal agencies to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with Trump’s first EO on the matter, which ordered the federal government to define sex as 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, told Newsmax earlier Thursday.

Mark Swanson ✉

Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.

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