The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced an about-face on its 2022 “participation policy” for transgender-identifying athletes this week: No longer are men allowed to self-identify their way into women’s sports.
“The new policy limits competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only,” the NCAA said in a press release, forced to acknowledge the genetic differences between men and women while bitterly clinging to the anti-science trans-speak “assigned at birth,” as if chromosomal makeup is arbitrary.
Regardless of the continued language manipulation, however, the policy change stands — and it’s a direct result of female athletes demonstrating the myriad ways male athletes have harmed them, plus a strong leader in the White House who is willing to listen and act.
On Wednesday, just one day before the NCAA policy reversal, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (titled simply “Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Sports“) that stripped all funding from educational programs that let men and boys infiltrate women’s and girls’ athletics. “It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly,” the order reads, not only for reasons of “safety” and “fairness,” but also to preserve “dignity, and truth.”
The NCAA allowing males to compete against females “is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports,” Trump’s order says.
The president is clearly listening to the many brave women who have risked their reputations and much more to share their stories of discrimination and danger. One of these women, NCAA Division 1 athlete Sia Liilii, then the captain of the University of Nevada, Reno, women’s volleyball team, led her teammates in protesting and then forfeiting a game against San Jose State University’s women’s team because it included a trans-identifying male player. As IW Features highlights in a documentary about Liilii’s experience, her school refused to support its own women’s team.
Hellbound and Down 