With the issue and status of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports becoming more controversial, high profile, and divisive—and with all the turmoil tethered to politics at all levels—people are paying keen attention to the rules and policies of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) on the matter.
The NCAA is among the largest and most powerful sports organizations in the world and holds tremendous social, economic, and cultural sway and influence.
The NCAA governs and regulates athletic competition of the approximately 1,000 colleges and universities across America and Canada. Its rules and regulations support more than 500,000 student athletes.
And the NCAA is a big-money enterprise. In 2019, the year prior to the pandemic, colleges and universities generated, through ticket sales and sponsorships and media deals, close to $19 billion.
It has only been in the past few years that the NCAA’s rules on athletes who are transgender—defined as identifying as a gender other than the one with which they were born—have been substantively tested and tried. As well, over this same period, the NCAA rules on transgender athletes, for the first time, have been broadly subject to strong scrutiny.
A fundamental reason for the heightened interest in policies and regulations regarding transgender athletes, is the recent rapid growth in numbers not only of young people who view themselves as transgender, but also youth experiencing gender dysphoria (unease and unhappiness with one’s biological sex), and teens and young adults who do not identify specifically as either male or female, but as nonbinary.
As well, driving and at the forefront of the public discussion and turmoil are two former NCAA Division I swimmers: Riley Gaines, a multi-time All-American as a member of the University of Kentucky women’s team, and Lia Thomas, who while competing for the University of Pennsylvania women’s squad became the first transgender individual to win an NCAA Division I championship.
In the latter stages of the 2021-2022 U.S. college swim season, Ms. Gaines and Mr. Thomas emerged in the spotlight and at the center of the debate, holding and operating positions opposed to one another.
It was at the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships held in March in Atlanta where Mr. Thomas, in winning the 500-yard freestyle event, did what no other transgender female had done—finish first in an NCAA Division I competition. Mr. Thomas’s time was 4:33.24, which was 1.75 seconds ahead of runner-up, Olympic silver medalist Emma Weyant of the University of Virginia. At the same championship meet, Mr. Thomas and Ms. Gaines tied for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle.
On the issue of whether Lia Thomas should have the right to compete in the women’s category, there were throngs of voices on both sides—those who said yes, he did; and those who said no, he didn’t, because he retained physical advantages from growing up as a male.
Lia Thomas, who entered UPenn in 2017, swam for the Quakers’ men’s team as a freshman and sophomore. He would not begin his hormone transition to a female until May 2019, following the end of the 2018-19 season.
As a freshman and sophomore, Lia Thomas was a top competitor in the men’s category.
His freshman year, he had the sixth fastest time in the nation in the 1000-yard freestyle event, and his sophomore year, he finished second in the 500-yard, 100-yard, and 1,650-yard freestyle at the Ivy League championships. As a sophomore, he ranked 65th nationally in the 500 freestyle and 554th in the 200 freestyle.
Riley Gaines Speaks Out and Leads a Movement
Soon after the 2022 NCAA meet, Riley Gaines issued a series of public statements in which she denounced the NCAA’s position on transgender women competing against those who were born biological females, also called cisgender females. Ms. Gaines described the organization’s policies as unfairly depriving women of opportunity; indeed, she attests, that those policies undermine the protections and enforcement of equal opportunity for women enshrined in Title IX, the landmark civils rights law enacted in 1972 organizations that received federal money from discriminating on the basis of sex.Ms. Gaines has become the face and standard bearer of the movement opposing transgender females competing in collegiate women’s athletics.
“About three weeks before our national championships, we were told that [Lia] Thomas would compete with the females and I was shocked,” said Ms. Gaines in an exclusive interview with EpochTV conducted in August 2022. “I had no idea what to expect, what this would look like, and I think all of the girls were kind of in the same boat.
“We just really had no clue what this was going to be because it was something that happened so discreetly and so quick. But then we get to the point where we’re racing. I saw Thomas win a national title that first day, which is just heartbreaking.”
Many Moving Parts—and Still Many Questions
The NCAA is trying to find its way with its transgender rules and regulations.In January of 2022, the NCAA Board of Governors updated its Transgender Student-Athlete Participation Policy.
And in April of this year, the NCAA further updated the policy to “provide increased clarity.”
The most recent update comes on the heels of a change in leadership at the organization.
In March, Charlie Baker, the two-term Republican governor of Massachusetts (2015-2022), was named president of the NCAA.
When updating the policy last year, the Board of Governors decided that instead of instituting a blanket set of guidelines that covers all sports, the NCAA would take a “sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation that preserves opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all who compete.”
As well, under the new guidelines, the NCAA would follow the lead of the Olympics, and called for “transgender participation for each sport to be determined by the policy for the national governing body of that sport, subject to ongoing review and recommendation by the NCAA … “
As the NCAA wrestles with and seeks to establish a workable transgender policy, its position and handling of the issue meets with intense challenges and questioning.
Charlie Baker testified on October 17, at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on NCAA reforms, including those involving transgender athletes and Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) compensation and arrangements.
During the hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) addressed complaints of Ms. Gaines regarding the 2022 NCAA championships, and the participation of Lia Thomas in the event, and the consequences for women competitors, including being assigned the same locker room as Mr. Thomas, who still has male genitalia, and who changed and undressed in the open and among the other swimmers.
“Earlier this year, this committee heard testimony from 12-time All-American swimmer Riley Gaines,” said Mr. Hawley. “She testified that in March of 2022, at the national championships where she was swimming, she was forced to share a locker room with a biological male, Lia Thomas.
Thinking ‘Creatively’
A leading voice on the issue of transgender women competing in collegiate athletics is Donna Lopiano, founder of Sports Management Resources, a consulting firm that assists colleges and universities in meeting the requirements of Title IX and other regulations.Ms. Lopiano has achieved renown for forthrightly stating that the issue of transgender women competing in college sports is complex, and a considerable portion of the loud and emotional arguments surrounding it do not account the nuance needed to move forward.
Ms. Lopiano—a former multi-sport standout athlete at the University of Southern Connecticut—believes that the NCAA, and most of organized sports, have more options available to them, options that won’t keep everybody happy, but are a lot fairer and more accommodating than what is available to the broad spectrum of transgender and cisgender athletes today.
“When transgender athletics policy was first being developed and put in place, there was this thought that with hormone therapy you could change the makeup of a male who had gone through puberty to enable fair competition with women,” said Ms. Lopiano in a conversation with The Epoch Times. “It was thought you could reduce their testosterone into the female range and reduce hemoglobin into the female range.
“And it wasn’t until five or six years ago that science started to talk about legacy advantage—that when a male goes through puberty, the body has longer bones, it has other changes that are irreversible and can’t be fixed by surgery, that can’t be fixed by hormone therapy.”
Ms. Lopiano, the former assistant athletic director at Brooklyn College, and the first Director of Women’s Athletics at the University of Texas, said that people need to think “creatively” about offering transgender and cisgender athletes not “identical” treatment but what Title IX defends and enforces—and that is “equitable” treatment.”
“Athletes who were born male but did not go through puberty should be allowed to compete in girls’ and women’s sports,” said Ms. Lopiano. “But, as in the case of Lia Thomas, who had gone through puberty, she would be allowed to be a part of the women’s team, but her performances would be timed and ranked in a different class than for those cisgender competitors.”
As for locker rooms and restrooms, Ms. Lopiano says it is an important matter that needs to be dealt with independent of sport.
“This isn’t a sports issue, but a public safety issue,” said Ms. Lopiano. “You don’t know if a man walking into a locker room is safe or not. I’ve never met a parent who says that it is all right for a teenage boy and teenage girl to be in a locker room together.
The NCAA Continues to Face Opposition
Nine Republican governors signed and sent a letter dated October 30 to the NCAA in which they called for the organization to change its transgender athlete policy.
In the letter, citing an excerpt from the NCAA Transgender Student Athlete Policy, the governors wrote: “The policy reads, ‘transgender student-athlete participation for each sport [is] to be determined by the policy for the national governing body of that sport.”
The governors went on to say that deferring to other sport governing organizations for policy setting, allows the “NCAA to avoid responsibility for ensuring the fairness of collegiate sports—therefore it must be changed.”
Signatories of the letter were governors Greg Abbott (Texas), Greg Gianforte (Mont.), Mark Gordon (Wyo.), Joe Lombardo (Nev.), Kristin Noem (S.D.), Mike Parson (Mo.), Tate Reeves (Miss.), Sarah Sanders (Ark.), and Kevin Stitt (Okla.).
Of those governors, only Joe Lombardo is from a state that has not banned transgender female athletes from competing in women’s sports.
