The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) changed its transgender athlete policy on Feb. 6, restricting participation in women’s sports to only athletes who were documented as female at birth.
According to the Trump administration’s interpretation, this is consistent with Title IX rules, which were established in 1972 to bar sex-based discrimination in education.
NCAA’s new policy is effective immediately and affects all athletes, even those under previous eligibility reviews. The nation’s largest governing body of college athletics, the NCAA oversees roughly 1,100 member schools and more than 500,000 athletes.
“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. “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
The NCAA’s previous transgender athlete policy adopted in 2022 gave each sport’s national governing body the authority to implement its own rules. For any sport without a national governing body, its international federation policy would apply—and if none is present, the sport’s previously established International Olympic Committee policy would take precedence.
The new revised NCAA policy allows athletes who are male by birth to practice with women’s teams. For example, women’s basketball teams sometimes practice with fellow students who are men. The policy also allows any athlete, regardless of sex at birth or “gender identity,” to compete with a men’s team if they meet the NCAA’s other eligibility requirements.
If a person who is female at birth has begun hormone treatment, that athlete can practice with a women’s team but cannot compete without risking the team’s championship eligibility, the NCAA said.
Not only are member schools responsible for athlete eligibility certification, but those schools must abide by local, state, and federal legislation that supersede the governing body’s rules, the NCAA said.
The NCAA announced its policy change just hours after the Department of Education said it was investigating possible civil rights violations at a high school sports league and two colleges that allowed transgender athletes to compete with women.
The agency’s reviews targeted the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, the University of Pennsylvania’s swimming program, and the San Jose State University’s volleyball team.
“The previous administration trampled the rights of American women and girls—and ignored the indignities to which they were subjected in bathrooms and locker rooms—to promote a radical transgender ideology,” Education Department Acting Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement.
The Biden administration’s new federal rules expanded Title IX to include protections for gender identity, but a federal judge overturned those rules this year.
