A coalition of female athletes and women’s advocacy groups has asked President-elect Donald Trump for his help in demanding that the NCAA “restore fairness and opportunity to collegiate sports.”
In a letter to Trump dated Jan. 9, the coalition requests that the president-elect use his “powerful voice to urge the NCAA to take action and clarify participation rules to protect the rights and opportunities of female athletes.”
The coalition alleged that the NCAA has “failed” to respond to female athletes “who have been forced to choose between forfeiting games or participating in competitions that are fundamentally unfair and even dangerous.”
The group said it is appealing to the NCAA “in the name of fairness and commonsense.”
The letter was sent on the day the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Kentucky struck down the proposed Title IX regulations created by the outgoing Biden Department of Education.
The proposed rules would have added the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the existing categories of male and female when defining sex discrimination.
The court decision applies to all educational institutions that receive federal funding.
Adopting the name “Our Bodies, Our Sports (OBOS),” the coalition is demanding that the NCAA establish and enforce the right of female athletes to participate in sports based on biological sex.
Beyond the Ruling
OBOS is demanding that the NCAA revoke all records set by male athletes competing in female sports and restore the female NCAA sports archives by erasing championship wins by teams with male players and those of individual male competitors.Single-sex locker rooms for female athletes are also among the OBOS demands, as is restoring the Title IX guarantee of equal opportunity for the sexes—a concept they say was “gutted” by the Biden administration.
Adriana McLamb is a former collegiate women’s volleyball player who is now coaching and serving as a recruiting coordinator in Florida.
McLamb, an activist with the Independent Women’s Forum, told The Epoch Times that the timing of the court ruling was good for her movement and that the election of Trump was “pivotal.”
“The two events mark the beginning of the change back to common sense. A male is a male and a female is a female,” she said.
“Though the fight is not over, we can see the end of men playing in women’s sports and women getting their locker rooms back. Protecting women’s spaces is not anti-trans. It is pro-woman.”
McLamb stated that banning males from women’s sports, revoking the records men set, and stripping championships from trans-identifying individuals or teams with trans-identifying players is about “protecting future female athletes and righting the wrongs of the past.”
Rachel Crandall-Crocker, executive director of TransMichigan, an LGBT advocacy group, told The Epoch Times that the proposed actions would be “absolutely discriminatory.”
Crandall-Crocker said that there will be protests and expressed hope that the court’s decision will be overturned on appeal.
At the close of the letter to Trump, the coalition writes: “We the undersigned represent thousands of female athletes and women’s advocacy groups from across the political spectrum.
“We stand together in honor of the generations of women who came before us and in defense of all the women and girls who will come next.
“We ask for your help in demanding that the NCAA finally act to restore fairness and opportunity in collegiate sports.”
The 11 signatories to the letter include the Independent Women’s Forum, Young Women for America, and the Women’s Liberation Front.
The NCAA and the office of the president-elect did not provide comment by publication time.
