The NCAA announced last week it is revising its transgender participation policy to allow individual sports to determine the matter for themselves. The move is little more than a cop-out, and one that allows the organization to wash its hands of the debate and avoid criticism from those rightly incensed about radical gender ideology and the damage it is doing to women’s sports.
But the rule change, as minor as it is, revealed something important: The NCAA knows it’s on the losing side here.
Under the NCAA’s new policy, each sport’s national governing body will determine its own policy on men competing in women’s sports. If no such governing body exists, transgender participation will be determined by the sport’s international federation rules. If a sport’s international federation rules don’t include a policy on transgender participation, the International Olympic Committee’s rules on the subject must be adopted. All policies are subject to review by an NCAA committee to the Board of Governors, the organization said.
But the NCAA’s rule change does not allow individual sports organizations to prohibit transgender participation altogether. The NCAA still requires “inclusion,” but it now allows each sport to set the parameters of that inclusion.
As my colleague Zachary Faria wrote last week, the rule change doesn’t go nearly far enough. It doesn’t “address the central problem — the clear, demonstrable, and unfair advantage” that male transgender athletes have over their female competitors.
However, the fact the NCAA felt the need to revise its position shows how unsustainable and indefensible it was.
No one who watched the video of Lia Thomas, a transgender former men’s swim team member from the University of Pennsylvania, finish a race nearly 40 seconds before anyone else could possibly think that race was fair. For the same reason, no one would expect a 150-pound girl to be able to hold a block against a 300-pound male linebacker on a football field.
Thomas had the advantage of training for years with testosterone, and the swimmer still enjoys the benefits of a male physique: larger hands and a bigger frame, both of which help enormously in swimming. It is impossible to look at Thomas’s times and not see those advantages at work.
That’s why one USA Swimming official who had worked for the organization for nearly 30 years decided to resign in December and why Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps compared Thomas’s dominance in the pool to doping. That’s also why many of the UPenn female swimmers have spoken out anonymously, why they considered boycotting their final home meet last year, and why many of their parents are fighting to force the school to make a change. These girls want what they are owed: a level playing field and a chance to compete and win.
Whether the NCAA will admit it or not, the organization knows it has denied female athletes that chance by forcing them to compete against transgender opponents. Hence the policy change. NCAA officials would rather let the blame fall on individual sports organizations than own up to allowing the destruction of women’s sports by male competitors.
But female athletes will remember the costs of the NCAA’s radicalism and how the organization refused to stand up for their rights when it was given the opportunity.
Kaylee McGhee White is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
